The Power of Beauty

Rosary Circle
Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio

I have been invited to present a paper at the conference The Power of Beauty in Steubenville, Ohio, at the Franciscan University of Steubenville.

Here is my proposed paper.

Reclaiming Beauty: Winning Back Our Western Civilization
Proposal for the conference The Power of Beauty
Kidist Paulos Asrat

The paper 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 through 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 intellectual leaders.

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

Yet, people want beauty. And they will surround themselves with some kind of aesthetic quality. The man on the street may be able to recognize beauty, but he would not be able to explain why it is beautiful. He may desire beauty, but does not know how to attain it. And he is easily distracted by destroyers of beauty. It is the the task of experts to guide him in the right direction.

With Reclaiming Beauty, I will make a historical, cultural and societal review of beauty. I will trace the steps when beauty was eventually abandoned as a paradigm for civilization.
Rather than attributing beauty to a Godly goodness, philosophers, writers and artists began to view beauty as their 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.

Part of the ideas for my paper will be revisions of what I've been developing over a number of years online at my websites Camera Lucida, Our Changing Landscape and Reclaiming Beauty, and in my articles from Kidist P. Asrat Articles.

The website Reclaiming Beauty is interactive. Members can post their original articles, short commentaries, and articles and excerpts from other authors. I encourage feedback and comments from members. I plan for this online group to develop into more formal groups which can meet in physical locations regularly, where they can building beauty societies whose purpose would be to develop ideas and strategies for bringing beauty back into our culture, and to eventually reclaim beauty.

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The Freedom Ideologues

Freedom of Choice Ideologue, Hiris Ali

I wrote a few weeks ago about Ayaan Hiris Ali in Hirsi Ali is no Spokeswoman for the West:

She is not fighting an existential fight, but what looks like a personal one. She spent all these years fighting Islam, compromising herself and endangering her colleagues in order to escape Islam, and the best she can come up with is that she will let her son decide his religion (or no religion), and that she's "hoping it does not happen" that he "choose" Islam. For this declared atheist, the freedom of choice of her son is more important than his spiritual integrity. And this is her fatal problem, making her a dangerous spokesman for the West's survival. She has no armor with which to combat this combative religion other than "freedom of choice."

Mark Richardson, at Oz Conservative, continues to write about freedom of choice, and the idea of freedom in the West. He writes this time specifically about incest:

Here again [where incest is considered to be a "fundamental freedom"] we have a problem doing great harm to Western societies. Freedom is held to be the sole, overriding good and freedom is understood in a limited way as individual autonomy. Other goods in society are sacrificed to this one reductive understanding of morality - which means inevitably that people don't even end up feeling free or autonomous.

In my post about Ali, I write that giving her son this freedom of choice (to choose his religion), ultimately risks letting her son choose to not be free.

Irrelevant also of Ali's decisions affecting her son, what we should be concerned with these freedom of choice ideologues is that their belief system is flawed, and it is ultimately dangerous to our way of life.
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The Book of Your Choice

From the inside cover:

The illustrations are frm books written and drawn by Kate Greenaway, the famous Victorian painter who greatly influenced the art of the 19th century. The cover and back are from "Marigold Garden", published in 1885, and the inside from "Under the window", published in 1878.

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The Dancer

The Dancer
By: Kidist Asrat

With gliding entrance, and touch of doubt,
The dancer makes her entrance.
As supple as a a feline, ready for attack
She lunges into lively conveyance.

Hers is the stage, an empty stage,
Earthly, and void of enchantment.
A magical message she has to disclose,
And does so with fiery entreatment.

One perceives a sudden change of mood,
And the stage has lost its drear.
Her audience now she tries to lure
As her final act draws near.

Winner of Poetry Prize
Dover College
England
1978
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She Plays the Piano and Violin, and She Also Sings

East Kent Mercury, Thursday June 3, 1976

Kidist (13) wins Collegs award

The 13-year-old head girl of Betteshanger School, Kidist Asrat, has won a scholarship at Dover College

Until last year the College was for boys only. But there are now an increasing number of girls being accepted, and Kidist is the first girl to win such a scholarship at the College.

She gained the award at the recent Scholarship Examinations at the College, and it is to a maximum of 500 per year.

Called the Astor Scholarship, it was awarded to Kidist for her all-round qualities of work, music and character. She plays the piano and violin, and she also sings.

Kidist comes from Ethiopia.

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The Raggle-Taggle Snake

The Raggle-Taggle Snake  

                                              I  am  frightened  not  knowing
                                             what to  do.  I  start  screaming,
                                                                                   I start
                                                                              to  run
                                                                          But  my
                                                             legs are stiff.
                                       I can't see it but I hear  it.
                        Now I see it, wiggly, waggling
                     With its long ugly body.
                   I jump up
              And down
          Screaming.
     My heart
    thumps
       fast.
          I'm scared.
               I bow my head for the poison to pass above me...
                      My heart stops thumping and happiness falls over
                                                                                         My face.

By Kidist Asrat
Form 3h
English School
Ethiopia
1972
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The Scripture Prize

I'm going through some photographs and documents, and I found this. I won the Scripture Prize as a young girl. I don't know how I got that honor except that I remember going to confirmation classes in my primary school (I was thirteen), thinking I would be confirmed. But the protocol was more complicated than that since I was at the school as an Orthodox (Ethiopian Orthodox). I sang in the choir, attended church service every Sunday (with the choir), and probably some other days too. I performed in some of the great cathedrals (they were generous to small school choirs), celebrated Christmas and Easter and other holidays with choral aplomb, but I still wasn't an Anglican!

I think (I don't remember my exact thought process) that attending Divinity classes might earn me an honorary Anglican membership. And I participated eagerly, interested and engaged. And that might have got me the Scripture Prize! That same year I also got the Music Prize, and later on, the French Prize. I think I was the proudest of the Scripture Prize. It was unique and serious. Knowing something worth being rewarded for about religion, the Bible and other sacred things is not an easy feat!
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The Good a Christian Does

Gold Leafs
[Photo By: KPA]

Here is a wonderful analogy about God's grace, from C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity:

...the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it.

C. S. Lewis
Mere Christianity
Book 2. What Christians Believe
Chapter 5. The Practical Conclusion

(Above excerpt from p.63)

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Yale's False Supporters

Hirsi Ali in Yale on September 15, 2014
She is surrounded by wood panels of The Sheffield-Sterling-Strachona Auditorium
in Yale, a testament to architect Clark Zantzinger, who fashioned
this after traditional wainscot paneling.


The Sheffield-Sterling-Strachona Auditorium in Yale,
where Hirsi Ali gave her recent lecture


View of the auditorium from the stage
More information on the hall at Yale's website
[scroll down the linked page]

Here is some background on the Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall:

Until 1860 the Medical Institutions was situated in a hotel built by James Hillhouse, at the corner of what are now Prospect and Groves Streets. This building, which Yale purchased for $12,500, later became Sheffield Hall and remained part of the Yale scene until it was removed in 1931 to make way for the Sheffield-Sterling-Strathchona Hall. The location of the new school in this spot marked the beginning of the spread of the college to the north.

Yale: A History
Brooks Mather Kelley:
P. 132
Google books

The architect for the current building is Clark Zantzinger of Zantzinger, Borie & Medary, Architects, who also built:

- 1917: Washington Memorial Chapel, Valley Forge National Historical Park, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
- 1926-27: Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company Building, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Now part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
- 1927-28: Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan
- 1932-35: Department of Justice Building, Washington, D.C.

With her forceful, but ambiguous message of "freedom of choice," Hirsi Ali stands in the elegant halls of Western academia, but she is not a trustworthy champion of the West.

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Here are some recent posts I did on Hirsi Ali:
- Creed vs. Conscience
- Hirsi Ali is no Spokeswoman for the West
- Ferguson in America: And His Wry Belief in the Fall of American Power
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Ferguson in America: And His "Wry Belief in the Fall of American Power"

Ferguson defending his book The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die,
to what looks like a skeptical interviewer at WNYC

Hirsi Ali's recent appearance at Yale has brought her into the limelight again, and I commented on this in my last two posts: Creed Vs. Conscience, and Hirsi Ali is no Spokeswoman for the West.

Below, I've re-post an article I wrote about her now-husband Niall Ferguson, at my blog Camera Lucida, written on August 20, 2012 (about a year ago), and how I think I qualify to critique, and even denounce, Ferguson's (and Ali's) positions on culture and politics:

Ferguson in America

I'm the last one to talk about non-Americans talking/writing about American affairs, but I think (I know) I have much more sympathy and admiration for America than many who spend a lot of their time dissecting the country.

As I mentioned earlier, I was recently there for about two weeks, and felt much more at home there than I do here in Toronto. One could say that New York is different, but as I have written before, I spent my formative adult years in the U.S. I went to undergraduate in a small college in Pennsylvania (Lock Haven University), and went on to get a masters at Rutgers University, with a some time in the Univseristy of Connecticut before my parents sponsored me to come and immigrate to Canada. I have always been a reluctant Canadian, and I am not being ungrateful, since I am sure that my presence here "benefits" the multi-culti ethos that pervades the country. Of course, Canadians are always shocked when they find out that I don't believe in, nor participate in, multiculturalism. In fact, most of my activities denounce it.

So, having said that, I think I have more clout to talk about America than does Niall Ferguson, who is the mentioned in Lawrence Auster's discussion on the Newsweek article which Ferguson wrote.

I agree that only someone scornful of America would head his article with: "Obama's Gotta Go" which is some kind of American slang which Ferguson uses to make his title rhythmically interesting. The rhythm is in black style, another jab at Obama, who is black, but doesn't "act" black. So, this scornful Ferguson even mocks one of the cultural elements of America - black slang and swagger, which at its best is entertaining and charming. Ferguson could have just left off those references.

But, who is Ferguson to talk? He is married to a black woman, a Somali foreigner who lives in America. She is not there for the love of America, but for the convenience of being in America (and being American). In fact, she recently had a child with Ferguson, whose tawdry personal life involves several bouts of adultery during his first marriage, including with Ali. The child they have together is illegitimate. In a Globe and Mail interview, the "devout" atheist, anti-Christian Ali says that she doesn't mind if her child, at adulthood, comes to her and declares he's a Muslim. "Alright, go for it" will be her response.

Ali is also involved in "helping" Muslim women escape Muslim countries through her foundation the AHA Foundation, which means that she will simply increase the number of Muslims (albeit female only) into the West without any considerations for their assimilation, change of religion to fit with the West's Christian culture, or any other such matters. Her idea is not to help the West, as she keeps repeating like a parrot, but to ultimately help those like her, who have semi-denounced their cultural and religious upbringings, but who can also be part (of families, of groups) who haven't. Letting in one Muslim woman also is some guarantee that the "abusive" husband, or sister with a family of five, etc. will make it into the West, increasing the Muslim population in the West.

So, when her grown son encounters one of these Muslim women's daughters, whom she helped to immigrate to America, and declares his intentions to marry her, Ali's response would be: "Go for it."

Finally, Ferguson himself has a website where he posts some of his articles. One that caught my attention, but I didn't know how to bring it up in a previous blog post, is his eulogy for China. Of course, like all clever neoconists, he words his article well. But it is an article with a message of submission to Chinese power, and a wry belief in the fall of American power. I, as a mere cultural observer, do not believe that America will succumb to China, whether militarily, economically or culturally. Or that the Chinese will reach the level of American greatness, with their corrupt system and third world-like conditions which they try hard to hide from the world. Barack Obama may try to speed up the process, and Ferguson may continue his rap of Barack attack, but the American people will realize how much they have to lose if they relinquish their position to a Chinese hegemony.

I doubt Ferguson believes, or wants to believe, this. His convoluted position, of submission coupled with sporadic aggression, doesn't have the principles to reveal to him America's strength and beauty.

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Hirsi Ali is No Spokeswoman for the West

In my previous post Creed and Conscience, I wrote the following about Hirsi Ali's remark that she would let her son choose his religion when he's old enough to decide:

If she has spent her whole adult life denouncing Islam, and writing about its evils, then why would she want her son to "choose" Islam? It is as though she's hedging her bets, and doesn't want the responsibility of influence a child's life into nihilism. Let him do that for himself!

She is not fighting an existential fight, but what looks like a personal one. She spent all these years fighting Islam, compromising herself and endangering her colleagues in order to escape Islam, and the best she can come up with is that she will let her son decide his religion (or no religion), and that she's "hoping it does not happen" that he "choose" Islam. For this declared atheist, the freedom of choice of her son is more important than his spiritual integrity. And this is her fatal problem, making her a dangerous spokesman for the West's survival. She has no armor with which to combat this combative religion other than "freedom of choice."

If her son becomes one of those Muslims living in a Western city, making demands for mosques, Islamic schools, special dietary regulations for Muslims in restaurants and shops, and the myriad of other cultural changes that Islam has been demanding in Western cities, and making her particular Western city into the one that she left behind in Somalia, will she still say "he is free to choose his religion?" What if one day she reads about him in the news, and finds he'd strapped bombs to his chest in the name of Allah?

What an obtuse, and dangerous, woman. It is important that we point out these inconsistencies, rather than naively promote her as the saviour of the West.
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Creed Vs. Conscience

Here is a recent photograph of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, at Yale in mid-September, 2014
She looks strained, and her red eyes indicate fatigue, or lack of sleep.
Motherhood, and an activist's life must be taking their toll

After the usual fanfare that follows Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she was finally able to make her speech at Yale University.

I've written about her over the years (see list below), and I've tried to understand her. Finally, this time, I can only say that she's not a very intelligent woman, but has an aggressive personality and is unafraid to "jump in" as she has with many instances both in her private and activist life.

She first came into the limelight in Dutch politics when she publicly denounced Islam, which caused her to go into hiding for fear of her life. But, her outspokenness, even in hiding, caused her to endanger the life of Geert Wilders, another Dutch politician.

Her affair and consequent marriage to British historian Niall Ferguson, broke up his sixteen-year marriage.

Here is her jumbled messages on religion, declaring herself an atheist, at her Yale speech:

Muslim Students Association of Yale, you live in a time when Muslims are at a crossroad. Every single day, there is a headline that forces the Muslim individual to chose between his conscience and his creed. The Muslim world is on fire. And those fanning the fire are using your core creed. With every atrocity they commit, they remind the Muslim of his commitment to submit to Allah. Will you submit, passively or actively, or will you finally stand up to Allah.

Is Ali denouncing Islam? Is she trying to find an Islam that suits her? Is she telling people to leave Allah?

One of her theses is that Islam can (should) be "reformed" as Christianity was "reformed." Her theological obtuseness is apparent here, when she compares two very different religions and tries to fashion one like the other ("Islam can be reformed, like Christianity!"). And if it isn't, that is because of the backwardness of Muslims. So in one conceptual fallacy, she manages to insult Christians (Islam is like Christianity), Muslims (Islam can be "reformed" like Christianity), and Muslims again (your religion is barbaric and inhuman). And Christians and Muslims alike, by declaring her theological superiority all the while declaring herself irreligious - an atheist.

While she was expecting her child, she was interviewed by the Globe and Mail about how she would raise him:

Globe And Mail: What if your son decides to follow Islam?

Ali:...I have to do what my father and my mother were incapable of doing, which is to say, “Alright, go for it.” I'm hoping it does not happen.

You have to let individuals make their own choices and respect that, even if it's your own child...

I want to be strong enough to tell my son, it's your choice.

Again, with Ali, it is all a jumble. If she has spent her whole adult life denouncing Islam, and writing about its evils, then why would she want her son to "choose" Islam? It is as though she's hedging her bets, and doesn't want the responsibility of influence a child's life into nihilism. Let him do that for himself! And although she declares herself an atheist, it seems that she is passing on theological decisions to him.

Atheists are the biggest hypocrites. They always surreptitiously reveal that they do "believe" after all, if only to hedge their bets.

So will it be her conscience that will tell her son to follow his creed, if that is what he "chooses?"

Here are my previous posts on Ali (dating from 2008):
Islam's Missionary Women
Hirsi Ali and Knopf Canada
All about Ayaan
All About Ayaan Part II
The Vacillation Hiris Ali, or All About Ayaan Part III
Hirsi Ali on the View From the Right
More on Hirsi Ali and Her Disdain for Christianity
Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Latest Update
Hirsi Ali's Advice to Geert Wilders
Hirsi Ali and Ferguson busy making babies
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Sham Realism and the Usual Nihilism

Another New York icon for blowing up: The Brooklyn Bridge stylized with a pistol

I've posted below the full article by Armond White Working Class Goes to Hell: Drop and The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby. Once again, movies make a mess of class realism.

The article is posted on National Review Online.

I post it here because I read it just after I posted my recent article on the 9/11 memorial, where I wrote: "A defeatist, nihilistic symbol will produce a defeated people."

White, in the article below, expands on the nihilism of contemporary films. He writes in the article:

Lehane’s popularity among filmmakers, from Clint Eastwood to Scorsese, points to an ongoing class war between out-of-touch professionals who have enjoyed class ascension and self-hating audiences who eagerly accept the worse view of themselves as if confronting hard facts of life. This sham realism [in the film] contains the usual indie-movie nihilism.

He continues:

Cynics love this junk for its simultaneous wallowing in decadence..., sanctimony..., and self-pity...

It is far easier to wallow in decadence, sanctimony and self-pity than to take a stand against these camouflaged evils, expose them, and provide (and live) an alternative life of goodness, choosing God instead of the devil. Our modern world, as I wrote in the article linked above, has left us with

a depressing, generic memorial, which has become the norm in our godless, non-spiritual world.

This norm is not only in our public memorials, but in our personal presentations, where dark, nihilistic clothes now make up standard attire.
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Working Class Goes to Hell: Drop and The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby
Once again, movies make a mess of class realism.
By Armond White
September 11, 2014
Another Dennis Lehane carnival of urban clichés, The Drop uses the story of a quiet, lonely Brooklyn barkeep, Bob Malinowski (Tom Hardy), who outwits the criminals, the cops, and the people around him, for a fable that is sinister, sentimental, ironic, and worthless.

Based on Lehane’s short story “Animal Rescue” (which became the intro to his novelization The Drop), the film belongs to the same trash heap as Hollywood’s other Lehane adaptations such as Gone Baby Gone and Mystic River. It transfers those Boston-based tales to New York, the epicenter of current miscreant mythology. It’s a confabulation of news media, publishing, TV, and Hollywood industries, where hardboiled fiction and urban crime are combined into cheap and trite storytelling (what the book industry calls thrillers) and has become a new dark brand of Americana.

From its opening voiceover narration, The Drop is both fake and familiar. Its characters are all woebegone: bar owner Marv (James Gandolfini), the scared and scarred abused girl Nadia (Noomi Rapace), and Bob himself, so emotionally recessive he thinks and speaks dull-wittedly and stumbles instead of walks — a plot device of slow-boiling rage. (Bob closely relates to the pitbull puppy he rescues.) The underworld subplot involving drop-offs for Chechan mobsters is a dismal, lazy way to deal with the contemporary social challenges and the seemingly inescapable beat-down of working-class life.

Alert, socially conscious viewers might trace Lehane’s genre to The Sopranos and its exurban offshoots, like New Jersey‘s Boardwalk Empire and Maryland’s The Wire (to which Lehane contributed), that twisted the gangster genre into a perverse, overly self-conscious version of social realism. These urban-crime tales excite viewers from the middle class to the underclass by pretending to show how rough today’s pitbull-versus-pitbull world can be. A bizarre form of gallows escapism, they simplify the gradual decline of our cities. It is the pretense of an author like Lehane to pinpoint corruption while also profiting from it.
This distraction from political reality indicts that entire entertainment complex that takes a sentimentalized (and half-understood) history of ethnic struggle that frequently includes criminality, such as Marv’s pathetic get-rich scheming, as the pattern of ethnic desperation. Lehane’s insipid moralizing offers psychological rationales: Americans like Bob, Marv, and Nadia harbor such horrors from their pasts that they have no recourse other than reprobate behavior — which Martin Scorsese’s hysterical film version of Lehane’s Shutter Island illustrated, as does the equally ludicrous The Drop.

Lehane’s popularity among filmmakers, from Clint Eastwood to Scorsese, points to an ongoing class war between out-of-touch professionals who have enjoyed class ascension and self-hating audiences who eagerly accept the worse view of themselves as if confronting hard facts of life. (Note Bob’s strange locution “That‘s unlike me” to explain or disguise an eccentric act.) This sham realism contains the usual indie-movie nihilism. One cop exclaims, “Well, I’ll be damned.” And his female partner responds, “Like you weren’t already.” It’s the same laughably literary conceit as in Cormac McCarthy’s “original” screenplay for Ridley Scott’s The Counselor. Cynics love this junk for its simultaneous wallowing in decadence (Bob’s local parish church is about to close), sanctimony (Bob’s chivalrous defense of Nadia), and self-pity (“You have to be alone forever,” Bob philosophizes).

The class condescension in The Drop has become such a cliché that even Belgian director Michael R. Roskam can imitate the Brooklyn miasma with the same fake fussiness as native son James Gray. This gloomy, hardboiled pathos exposes the filmmakers’ distance from their subject. When Italian director Elio Petri made The Working Class Goes to Heaven (also known as Mimi the Metalworker) in the early ’70s, the defense of lower-class struggle was part of Petri’s combined Communist critique and satire. Lehane sends the working class to hell out of Hollywood/literary pity. It’s nothing less than cultural decadence that should be obvious to anyone who doesn’t have an academic or industry stake in denying the problem. Imagine if the makers of The Drop had kept Lehane’s original title and honestly asked moviegoers to approve the symbolic treatment of their lives as animals?

***

Why would first-time feature director Ned Benson The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby allude to the title of a famous 1966 Beatles song and then deny an exploration into its meaning? That bad idea is a warning. So is the story’s confounding presentation. Benson’s tale of a broken marriage between once-blissful young parents Conor (James McAvoy) and Eleanor (Jessica Chastain) started in two separate films, one subtitled “Him,” the other “Her.” This reviewer endured the remix, a third version subtitled “Them.”

McAvoy’s ornery petulance as the bratty son of a restaurateur and Chastain’s actressy traumatized daughter of a professor make an annoying, mismatched pair. This is the opposite of The Drop, as both these affluent characters are meant to be envied, even in their exasperating, enervated struggle to find the companionship they lost. They suffer in luxe settings and among highly theatrical peers (William Hurt, Viola Davis, Isabelle Huppert) who seem signed on for narcissism (acting out one “heartfelt” confession after another) not truth. Here’s a different kind of class displacement — filmmakers who are so out of touch with the prosperity to which they have ascended that they falsify the terms of their apparent spiritual emptiness. Fatuous Benson, who treats Conor and Eleanor as teenagers, relates it all to a song — and it’s a song he doesn’t seem to understand.

When The Smiths updated “Eleanor Rigby” as “Vicar in a Tutu” (1986), the new song satirized a pre-millennial sense of spiritual isolation. Skepticism, tradition, impudence, and desperation were examined and then redeemed for a powerful and refreshed sense of identity. Challenging pop and religious heritage, and hearing its echo, the Smiths were also marvelously rooted to it. In The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, Benson and cast seem unaware they are rootless.

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White briefly mentions Martin Scorcese's Shutter Island in his article, where he writes:

Americans like Bob, Marv, and Nadia harbor such horrors from their pasts that they have no recourse other than reprobate behavior - which Martin Scorsese’s hysterical film version of Lehane’s Shutter Island illustrated, as does the equally ludicrous The Drop.

I discuss this phenomenon in a post from 2011, where I write:

A recent program on Television Ontario's news/current affairs program The Agenda had a panel discussion it titled as "Zombie Zeitgeist" and had zombie experts from various universities as guest on its panel...It is astonishing how seriously they all take the topic, including the usually sharp and adroit host of the program Steve Paiken.

I noticed this foray into the "unreal" with two films that Leonardo DiCaprio made, in quick succession just last year: Shutter Island and Inception. DiCaprio's characters enter some abyss (in Shutter Island we find out that he's actually mad) where the laws of reality (including gravity) don't exist, or at least they don't fully and consistently exist.

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The Twin Towers Memorial

The bombing of the Twin Towers has left a hollow in the American spirit. I sense that whenever I travel to the US, and specifically New York. People are quieter, softer. This is not the New York spirit.

The memorial for the destroyed towers and the 3,000 dead dwells on death. Or, on the nihilism of these deaths. It is not a memorial as much as a hollow pit (or two hollow pits) where there is insatiable grief. Memorials are not happy places, of course, but they should have some dignity for the dead. In this case, the two pits look like mass burial holes. The names, which no-one will read in their entirety, look like carved lines.

To give these 3,000 names more meaning, they should have made crosses with the names carved on them. No-one will take the time to read them all, of course, but the combined presence of these 3,000 crosses would give a deeper, more spiritual meaning to the deaths.

The lights, which emit from these pits, go upwards. I thought this was an attempt to send the souls of these dead upwards towards the sky, if not to heaven. But no! These lights are "search lights." Still searching for more dead bodies?

The argument against these symbols would be, how about those that are not Christian? Therefore, the lights cannot go to heaven, and the crosses cannot be used. Our meaningful symbols are too specific, and what we're left with, in our multicultural era, is a depressing, generic memorial, which has become the norm in our godless, non-spiritual world.

But, ordinary people still want meaning in their lives. People reacted so negatively to the dark, empty granite sheath that stood for the original Vietnam Memorial, that another, showing soldiers in combat, was finally put up.

I suggest that such a sculpture be erected around this mound of granite at Ground Zero, since it is impossible to remove that mound now. It can be something as mundane as a sculpture of one of the passengers on a cell-phone, trasmitting information about the hijackers. Something which would show the bravery of an ordinary citizen, thinking about life, or the living, instead of death.

Memorials should of course be about the dead. But, they should also raise the spirits of the living, if only to say: Never Again! A defeatist memorial will produce defeated people, who will not be ready and vigilant enough to say "Never Again" let alone act to prevent atrocities from happening to their country.

A defeatist, nihilistic symbol will produce a defeated people. That is what the 9/11 memorial does. Of course, the name also has to go. What memorial gains any gravity when remembered as numbers? "The September 11 Memorial" or simply "The Twin Towers Memorial" can give strength back to New Yorkers, and to Americans.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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Osgoode Law School, Toronto

[Photo By: KPA]

This is the Osgoode Law School in Toronto.

The building is hidden behind trees and the dark railings, and the traffic-heavy Queen and University Streets. But, a lot happens behind its doors.

Architecturally, Osgoode Hall represents a blend of Palladianism and Neoclassicism characteristic of mid-19th-century Canadian architecture. The original building was erected in 1829-32 to designs by John Ewart, assisted by Dr. W.W. Baldwin. The building's unusual plan and elevation are a result of numerous successive additions by a series of different architects. Centre and west wings were added in 1844-6 to designs by Henry Bower Lane, establishing the basic composition of the present building. Renovations by Cumberland and Storm in 1857 replaced the centre wing and added other significant decorative and structural components. In 1865, a law school was added to the rear of the East Wing, to plans by William Storm. Additions and alterations to the building continued throughout the 20th century.

[...]

Since its construction in 1832, Osgoode Hall has served as the headquarters for the Law Society of Upper Canada, the governing body of the legal profession in Ontario. The building was named for William Osgoode, the first Chief Justice of Upper Canada. As law society headquarters, Osgoode Hall has provided a library, dining room and study space for practising lawyers since 1832. During the 19th century it also provided sleeping quarters for students-at-law. From 1889 to 1974 the law society operated a law school at Osgoode Hall, until 1959, the only one in the province. The law society continues to administer the bar admission course for Ontario from Osgoode Hall. Since 1846 Osgoode Hall has also served as a courthouse for senior provincial courts, and many important cases have been heard here. The Province has owned part of the building since 1874, with the Law Society retaining ownership of the East Wing and Great Library. Growth of both the law society and the court system prompted the numerous additions and alterations made to the building over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. [Source: Osgoode Hall National Historic Site of Canada]

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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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Light Reflections

[Photo By: KPA]
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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View Down Victoria Street

Victoria Street, Downtown Toronto
[Photo By: KPA]
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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Radiating Clouds

I took these photos of clouds during a one hour period. The clouds started off ominously dark, and I though we would get rain, then they got lighter, and a softer light started to glow out of them. Later, they cleared up completely, and we had blue skies.









This is when the dark edges started to move out, and we got these light, fluffy clouds:








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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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Book Project: Reclaiming Beauty

Gold Leafs
Photo By: KPA

Significance of Book Reclaiming Beauty

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. The realization of the horror they have created may have come too late, and too weakly, from 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.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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When All Else Fails, Try Goth

Amsale, Spring 2015


Carolina Herrera, Spring 2015

Amsale and Carolina Herrera use lace in a classic way.

Vera Wang designs tattered lace, and uses goth/vampire models to showcase them. There is a plethora of goth/vampire these days, which is probably what Wang is following, although goth seems a natural progression from her black wedding dresses.


Vera Wang, Spring 2015

That begs the question: Why? I think the answer is simple. It is Wang's lack of talent, and lack of skill. She changed from writing about fashion in Vogue for seventeen years to designing gowns where she found "Vogue was the best training ground any designer could have after." It is easier to design a tattered gown than one which is cut and shaped.

Amsale also came to fashion indirectly. She studied Political Science, but went to the Fashion Institute of Technology to study fashion after she designed her own wedding dress. She didn't have the presumption of thinking that just looking at wedding gowns would make her and expert designer.

Herrera grew up wearing high fashion. But, she too doesn't have the training. Her first designs were a test to see if she had the talent to pursue design. And she did, unlike Wang.

Although all three women had unconventional designing backgrounds, two - Amsale and Herrera - have the artistic talent for their work, and Wang doesn't.


"My bedroom is my sanctuary. It's like a refuge,
and it's where I do a fair amount of designing -
at least conceptually, if not literally."
From Business Insider: August 21, 2014

And there's Wang's work habits. Wang has advertised that she "designs" on her bed. It is no surprise what she comes up with.

Wang is not personally invested in marriage, and consequently in wedding dresses, as contradicory as that may sound. I think she went into wedding dress design as a marketing strategy. She divorced her husband of 23 years and "moved in" with the figure Olympic skater Evan Lysacek, who is some thirty years younger than her (she was 63 at the start of these stories, Lysacek was 27).

Herrera is in her second marriage, but she blames her youth to her unraveled first marriage, and has been married now for 46 years to her second husband. And Amsale has been married for 29 years.

Tattered chiffon and see-through lace have become the trade mark of Wang's dresses, who seems to be putting her marital disappointments and disillusionment into her dresses. And I believe that she is already not a very good designer, but is aggressive enough that she pushes her designs into the fashion world. And goth? Well, that is the life-denying imagery of contemporary art and design, where zombies and ghouls are quick becoming the representatives. It is not surprising that Wang follows this.

Here is Amsale's workspace, which looks like a mini-factory. And Herrera's atelier. Looking for Vera Wang work space through google, I found an image of Wang, in a work space (not bedroom), scribbling on the floor, with dogs running all over the paper. I don't think this was a "photo shoot" but rather an example of the slovenly habits of Wang. It is impossible to draw well on the floor, as my design experience has shown me.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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When New York Was New York

Times Square ca. 1985

This image is very similar to this one on Vintage NYC, who date the photograph around 1985

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There was a time when New York was upfront. Times Square may have been dangerous (in a pick-pocket sort of way, not terrorist bombers of this era), but it kept you on your toes, and made you realize that you were not in some paradise. It was, in a way, a metaphor for life.

Now, what you have is Disney. But mingled with bombs.

I prefer the old Times Square.

Oz Conservative writes about this in his post His dream is not my dream, which about a writer who says he wants the old New York of:

...a massive ecosystem of gay, lesbian, transgender, BDSM and plain old sleazy heterosexual hangouts: clubs, bars, dancehalls, cabarets and all the dim-lit alleyways and grassy knolls inbetween.

At least debauchery was debauchery, in those days.

Now we have Disney stores, giant characters from children's books accosting pedestrians, movie theaters which have taken the danger inside, call girls advertising in the back pages of local papers for Times Square hotels, and any one of the pedestrians carrying a bomb laced with religion?

So which is better, an upfront debauchery, which we can avoid, and at times sympathize with, if only to get its prisoners out, or one where its all camouflaged with the bright cheeriness of Disney?

And would anyone make movies about or around Times Square anymore, other than a multi-million sterile Disney film riding on the backs of innocent children?
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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