I keep planning to take my camera with me to take photos of the fall leaves. I keep forgetting to do so. Meantime, above are photos I took last year, which I cross posted at my photography blog.
Showing posts with label Nature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nature. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 02, 2012
Fall Leaves
I keep planning to take my camera with me to take photos of the fall leaves. I keep forgetting to do so. Meantime, above are photos I took last year, which I cross posted at my photography blog.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
A Most Ancient Spiral Galaxy
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The "grand-design" spiral galaxy described as "the most ancient spiral galaxy...ever discovered" shouldn't exist because "Current wisdom holds that such 'grand-design' spiral galaxies simply didn’t exist at such an early time in the history of the universe," according to this website.
And commenting on the structure of this galaxy, UCLA astrophysicist Alice Shapley opines:
The vast majority of old galaxies look like train wrecks...Our first thought was, why is this one so different, and so beautiful?And University of Toronto's David Law, who authored the study, comments:
The fact that this galaxy exists is astounding. Current wisdom holds that such ‘grand-design' spiral galaxies simply didn't exist at such an early time in the history of the universe.At the View From the Right, the sentiments are different. Lawrence Auster writes:
What a dumb, vulgar thing to say [that vast majority of old galaxies look like train wrecks] about objects ten billion years old, a hundred thousand light-years across, and each containing hundreds of billions or even tens of trillions of stars. No scientist in 1950 or 1970 would have said it...I think that people, modern, liberal people (which is the majority of the West now) have no principles with which to guide their observations of the world around them.
Far too often, scientists, like their fellow elites in contemporary liberated society who believe in nothing higher or truer than the disordered human self, seem to have no sense of appropriateness, no inherent respect for anything, for the isness of anything. They must drag everything down to the commonest level and make it appear to be as messy and meaningless as we ourselves—even objects that are infinitely vaster and older than anything we can conceive, and that express an order of which (notwithstanding scientific theories which claim to explain far more than than they really do explain) we have no idea.
The Good, the True and the Beautiful are no longer those solid principles with which we tried to understand the world around us. These principles were formed partly through religion (specifically Christianity) and partly through our cultural history and traditions. Society was thus constantly informed how to differentiate between good and evil, beautiful and the less beautiful, the true and the untruthful.
Now, since we have cast aside these traditions, and since religion is just something one harks back to on Christmas or a christening, we no longer have that to guide our understanding of the world.
So, the tremendous beauty, complexity, and mystery of the universe is smeared with the ugly words of a modern "scientist." Beauty, rather than bring things up to its level, is now dragged down to the putrid messes of the ugly. And this is just how modern people would have it, since bringing things down to the "equal" level of ugliness is much easier than bringing it up to the difficult hierarchical requirements of beauty.
If scientist are not in awe of what they're discovering, how can they enjoy their work? Why bother to spend hours, days and even years looking through a metal funnel if they are not impressed by what they see? Otherwise, they may as well spend their days looking at the crumbs on their desks, which is how the likes of David Law really do see their work, and hence their crass and crude comments on these celestial bodies.
I should add that pre-modern scientists had a much better sense of the mysterious, and were much more humble than their post-modern inheritors. As I've mentioned before, it was God who got discarded so that David Law and Alice Shapley can say (and believe) these things. Things are now measured in terms of man's limitations, rather than God's infinity.
Since my interest is beauty, I think what is going on is an elimination of beauty in our modern understanding of the world, which also leads to the elimination of the good and the true. I wrote here about beauty:
Ugliness rules. In clothing, in films, in art and even in our "representatives" of beauty. I don't think it is a lack of knowledge about beauty. We've developed standards and often unanimous agreement about what constitutes the beautiful. So I'm not going to into the beauty-hater's argument that beauty is relative; beauty can be objectively measured. What's going on is that people are hating beauty. It is a form of envy. If I cannot be beautiful, then why is she beautiful? It is like wealth, or intelligence, or a sense of entitlement to live anywhere one pleases. Spread the wealth, accept I.Q.ers of 91 into Harvard, let everyone from every corner of the world come into the prosperous West. Or youth. Why cannot I be as young (and attractive) as any fifteen-year-old, at my ripe old age of seventy? Such are the mantra of the equal-opportunity narcissists.
So, in order to fit in with their lowered standards, beauty magazines are (actually they have been, for decades now) publicizing ugliness in their fashion shoots, their models, and even with the "celebrities" and film actors they promote. There was a time when actresses like Elizabeth Taylor, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly and many more appeared in immaculate clothing, looking ethereally beautiful, at any age. And we admired them.
Sunday, September 09, 2012
Flowers of the Unicorn Tapestry
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South Netherlandish, 1495-1505
Wool warp with wool, silk, sliver, and gilt wefts
12ft. 7/18 in. x 8 ft. 3 in.
The Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of John D. Rockefeller Jr., 1937
I had been wanting to see the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters for many years. I have blogged about them here, and even written about their floral designs in this article (posted on my blog) on plants in the decorative arts (the original pdf article is on pp 3-4 of the Summer 2007 issue of the Botanical Artists of Canada Newsletter). As I wrote in my blog post in 2010 (when I first wanted to see them):
I have never been to The Cloisters, but have always known that they house the beautiful tapestries The Hunt of the Unicorn. But, I was lucky to see another set of unicorn tapestries, The Lady and the Unicorn (La Dame à la Licorne), housed in the Musée de Cluny, in Paris.And from my article:
One of the most enchanting mergers of scientific observation and religious symbolism are the tapestries of the Hunt of the Unicorn. These tapestries are covered with the late Medieval tradition of fields of millefleurs. When analyzed carefully, many of these flowers are clearly identifiable, in their correct environment. The Madonna Lily, depicted in The Unicorn in Captivity tapestry, is both a religious symbol of the purity of Mary and also a medicinal plant that treated burns, ulcers and ear infections, amongst other things.Finally, I got to see them during my trip in New York this past August. I tried to take photos (without my flash, as instructed by the guards), but couldn't come up with any decent images, so I had to make do with a postcard of The Unicorn in Captivity from the gift shop.
Here is a link to the Met, which has details of the flowers on the tapestry:
The Unicorn Tapestries: Flowers, Plants and Trees
Saturday, September 01, 2012
L'Heure Bleue
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I posted in my previous post an image of the Seine at "L'Heure Bleue" without explaining the meaning of the term.
From Wikipedia:
The blue hour comes from the French expression l'heure bleue, which refers to the period of twilight each morning and evening where there is neither full daylight nor complete darkness. The time is considered special because of the quality of the light at this time of day.The Wikipedia site has other interesting pieces of information, including art, books, films and music which use l'heure bleue.
Wikipedia continues with a more metaphoric meaning:
The phrase is also used to refer to Paris immediately prior to World War I, which was considered to be a time of relative innocence.
It is a hard moment to catch. It is not quite light, not quite dark, with a strange sense of stillness. A little like the moment of a full solar eclipse, when the earth seems momentarily to be at a standstill (I have seen a full one in 1991 in Mexico City, of course through safety glasses. One thing that struck me was the birds stopped chirping - I was near a wood - for those brief seconds).
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Straus Park in New York
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in Straus Park was sculpted by Augustus Lukeman
and dedicated on April 15, 1915.
I had my tablet with me while sitting in Straus Park in the Upper West Side in New York, and searched for the biblical quotation inscribed behind the statue (in gold, it is visible in the above photo) to see it in the context of the biblical story it came from:
Lovely and pleasant were they in their livesThe quote is a strange and obscure one. It tells the relationship between a father and a son (Saul and Jonathan), whereas the memorial is dedicated to a married couple.
And in their death they were not divided
II Samuel 1:23
I suppose we can use biblical texts to transfer to, and describe, many kinds of loves. Still, it is a little strange to transfer a father/son love to that of a married couple.
Ida and Isador Straus were on the Titanic when it sank. Ida, rather than save her life by boarding a lifeboat which was rescuing women and children (first), decided to stay with her husband as the ship sank. Eye witnesses say that Ida chose to remain on board with her husband, saying,"I have lived all these years with you. Where you go, I go."
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with 106th street in the background
I think a Biblical quote more appropriate to a married couple could have been found. I'm not sure who chose this quote, but it is probably a team of people from the various New York city offices, the sculptor and the the Straus family descendants. The plaque behind the memorial informs us that it was:
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There is also an eternal fountain (see top image), which originally flowed into a reflecting pool. The pool was filled in to create a flower bed for easier maintenance.
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the dedication of the Straus Memorial in 1915
[Photo Source: Library of Congress]
The portrait below is of Isador and Ida Straus. Here is information on Isador Straus, who was an important citizen of New York:
Isidor Straus (February 6, 1845 – April 15, 1912), a German-American, was co-owner of Macy's department store with his brother Nathan. He also served briefly as a member of the United States House of Representatives. He died with his wife, Ida, in the sinking of the passenger ship RMS Titanic.
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[Photo source: Straus Historical Society]
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
A View Across the Hudson
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This is a photo I took from Cloisters' terrace with a view of the George Washington Bridge and the Hudson River. Across the river is New Jersey, and the undeveloped stretch of land is the New Jersey Palisades. John D. Rockefeller had the Cloisters built especially to house his medieval collection. He also bought several acres of the Palisade hills across the river in order to have the best view possible from the Cloisters.
Below is a Wikipedia image of the Palisades with the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge (more on the Palisades at the link provided):
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Sunday, August 12, 2012
Adept Attackers of Beauty
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I sent the email below, along with a link of my blog post From Schiaparelli to Prada: Deterioration of Culture to a correspondent.
I have written a long post on the Met's exhibition "Schiaparelli & Prada, Impossible Conversations" (linked above), but this email adds more on my ideas and observations about the decline, or perversion, of culture that I see around me. Art, and artists, are often the first to grasp (either by accepting or rejecting) societal changes. I think Prada has given us some insights, not what she really wants us to see but nevertheless insights, on our current culture.
Here is my email, which I titled: War on Beauty and the related War on Masculinty:
Hi ____,
I read a little while ago your post on beauty with interest.
Beauty is a hard concept to "analyze" and to "deconstruct" as leftists love to do. It is an ethereal presence. We react to beauty rather than coldly observe it. We have to admit it is there in some things, probably not in us, and thus we realize it is some kind of favored state (it is clear that beautiful people, and babies, are treated better than ordinary people). At our best, we are humbled by beauty.
This hierarchy of beauty is what grates liberals and leftists.
I've written several (many) blogs on beauty, and I've noticed that there is an even more vicious war going on against beauty than when I started my blog a few years ago. This time, I think people are well-versed on how to attack beauty, and how to make beautiful people, things, etc. feel they're doing, and are, something wrong (and evil). Decades (even centuries, if you look back at the origins of modernism) have made such people adept attackers of beauty.
I wrote this post on Prada's really ugly clothes after I saw the exhibition "Schiaparelli & Prada, Impossible Conversations" at the Metropolitan Museum. Schiaparelli, in her time (around the turn of the 20th century), was considered a radical fashion designer, yet her least feminine designs are not as viciously ugly as Prada's. Schiaparelli was also much more talented, skilled (trained, I think) than Prada, and she admits the power of femininity and feminine beauty.
Prada is the post-modern feminist who seems to have a visceral hate for femininity. and feminine beauty, and ultimately beauty in general (I won't go into the many viciously anti-woman homosexual designers, since perhaps their deficiencies are obvious, but the heterosexual, female Prada is the ultimate betrayer.)
Prada of course supports all the evils that come with feminism, yet her life is strangely traditional, with a husband of several decades, two grown sons, and one son who is following her footsteps in her fashion design empire. She herself inherited this already successful empire from her father and grandfather, so she hardly qualifies as a female empire builder. She holds her temperamental husband at bay by giving him the high profile role of managing her company (and metaphorically, her too?). She's a clever, smart feminist. Those are the types that really do rule this world, since they realize that the female energy IS different than the male's. So, what they're after in not equality, but a reversal of roles (of power), even though they know from experience that this isn't likely to happen. But, I think even clever, smart Prada succumbs to her illusions, since her inner-most desire must be (from all the information she keeps giving us) to make women the superior sex. I think one of your correspondents called this envy. I think that is what it is. The natural, obvious, strength (power) of men, which they carry with such ease, is something to be admired, just as beauty is to be admired in beautiful women. When this admiration is perverted, it turns to something ugly like envy. I think we are in the age of perversions. And this is manifested, at least in my observations of culture, in the cult of ugliness as a vicious retaliation against beauty, and I think related to that (since it all presents itself as equality) the cult of male feminization, which is part of the degradation masculinity.
And finally, what happens if a woman can no longer be beautiful? The alternative now is that she has to look masculine. How does Prada reconcile all that with her "hatred" of masculinity AND femininity? One way is that modern fashion designers (and artists in general) who still work with/for/about women are creating alien monsters, neither male nor female. But, this is something I've just began to observe, and I still have to think about it some more.
Kidist
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Thursday, June 14, 2012
On My Way to the Waterfront
I didn't know how to put these unrelated photos (below) in one posting, but they are really connected through the thread of my walk down York Street, all the way to the lake shore.
I planned to do two things during this walk. One was to walk down to the waterfront and take early summer photos of the lake. The water is not the usual hazy pale blue, which is the color it gets later in the summer when the lake has warmed up, but a colder, darker blue with plenty of waves.
The second plan was to keep walking back up to the Art Gallery of Ontario, which is a little further north (and west) to see the Picasso exhibition, for which I had bought a half price ticket (at $12.50, it is a bargain), and also to visit the gallery's permanent collections during the Wednesday nights free entry (from 6pm-8:30pm). I reckoned I would rush through Picasso in half an hour and go to the various permanent collection galleries until the gallery closed. Which is exactly what I did. I will write about both of these visits soon (but Picasso's will be brief, as you can see I am NO fan, but I had to see this "event" in Toronto considering I have an art blog).
In the meantime, below are some photos I took on my way down (with a couple of detours here and there).
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A woman stopped to ask me what I saw. I said I liked the layers of highrises, with the interesting ogee point of the Trump Tower, the red facade of the Scotia Bank building and the triangular indentation in a darker color, and the exotic top of the Lombard Place building (in front of the Trump Tower and the Scotia building).
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I've blogged about Union Station here, including posting photos of its interior. This sprawling building, built when rail travel was a grand affair and train stations were grand buildings, is right by an unattractive highway exit.
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[Photos by KPA]
Thursday, June 07, 2012
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Monday, May 21, 2012
Sailing and Flying
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Tranquil scene on Lake Ontario, at a small town called Port Credit. What struck me about this scene was the white sail of the sailboat is mimicked by the white wings of the seagull.
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
"Magical thinking in secular modernity"
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My co-blogger at Jim Kalb's Other Trads has a great post up on magical thinking. Bruce Charlton starts off his long blog post "Magical thinking in secular modernity" thus:
As I well remember from my own experience, moderns and progressives like to imagine that they are hard-nosed, rational, empirical. Yet magical thinking abounds.And he heads his sections with: Education, Immigration, Economics, and somewhere in the middle he writes,
The magical thinking of modernity is pernicious because it chucks out the natural spontaneous transcendentalism that is intrinsic to humans - chucks out the soul, gods or God, the reality of reality and The Good (objective truth, objective virtue, objective beauty) - regards these as so much arbitrary made-up stuff, disproven, left-behind, naive, silly, embarrassing...
Then modernity makes-up new stuff, lots of new stuff, ever more and newer stuff; a truly arbitrary and unfounded set of assumptions; then extrapolates unconstrainedly from these assumptions, and then builds systems which are insufficiently systematic to cohere - and then regards the end result, this random heap of constantly-changing nonsense, as real!
So modernity regards education, immigration and economics as real; and the common sense natural way of thinking of historical humankind and the majority of the world (even now) and the views of the non-intellectuals as being childish nonsense.
Modernity disbelieves in magic, yet establishes magical thinking as the unchallengeable core of modernity.
Friday, April 06, 2012
Madonna Lily
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Pierre-Joseph Redouté
I cannot find any Easter lilies by botanical artist Pierre-Joseph Redouté, but I have found instead his Madonna Lily.
Thursday, April 05, 2012
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Lilium longiflorum:The Easter Lily
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[Photo by KPA]
The Allan Gardens Conservatory has a smattering of Easter lilies planted around the conservatory. I was expecting more. Perhaps there might be more closer to the holiday (April 8th), or more decoratively arranged. I went in to see what flowers had been planted for spring (the conservatory commemorates each season or holiday with a special display), but so far it looks sparse with cacti and leafy plants dominating. I hope it is a just matter of time before we see the holiday and seasonal plants.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Not Spring Yet in Toronto
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Images via the New York Post
I wish I could post photos like this, but not quite yet here. We still have leafless trees and gardens without flowers. But temperatures in the 2os!
Saturday, March 03, 2012
My Golden Hours
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There is a time of the day in photography called the golden hour, or the magic hour:
In photography, the golden hour (sometimes known as magic hour, especially in cinematography) is the first and last hour of sunlight during the day, when a specific photographic effect is achieved due to the quality of the light.The above shot is nowhere close to this moment. It was taken around mid-day. I have taken many shots of the Mies van der Rohe building. Its strong, metal structure gives modernism a good and dignified name. Glowing in the background is the Royal Bank building, whose luminescence is accentuated by the dark towers in the foreground, making the moment a "golden hour" in its own right.
I photographed a brief moment a couple of days ago when the sun came out, shining through the clouds with mottled patterns on the Bay. I had had to buy new batteries in a hurry as my trusted and true camera switched off as my charged batteries (which I forgot to charge) gave out. This sun-dappled moment lasted barely fifteen minutes, but I captured it.
My batteries failed (or I failed my camera) once again (!) at the van der Rohe building, so I had to run in and buy batteries (much cheaper this time). I ran out, and the moment was still there. A construction scaffold was in the way (it's been there for ages), but I got around it and managed the shot above.
Two golden hours in two days. That must be some kind of record.
