"GOD never changes; He never becomes better or worse; He never breaks His word (Numb, xxiii. 19). Creation made no change in God; from all eternity He had decreed the creation of the universe. God changes His works, but not His eternal decrees. By the Incarnation humanity was changed, but the Godhead underwent no change, just as the sun is in no way changed when it hides itself behind a cloud. Our thoughts are not changed when they clothe themselves in words; so the divinity was not changed when it clothed itself in the nature of man. God does not change when He punishes the sinner. When the heart of man is in friendship with God, God shows Himself to him as a God of infinite love and mercy; when the heart is estranged from Him, the sinner sees in the unchangeable God an angry and avenging judge. When the eye is sound, the light is pleasant to it; but if it is diseased, light causes it pain: it is not the light that is changed, but the eye that looks upon it. When an angry man looks in the glass he sees a different reflection from that which he saw when he was cheerful and in good-humor; it is not the glass that has changed, but the man. When the sun shines through colored glass, its rays take the color of the glass; the sun does not change, but…
Born in 1872 in Brighton, England, he was drawn to etching skin from an early age after seeing tattooed performers at the Royal Aquarium in London. He practiced on his brother and his classmates.
He joined the Royal Navy as a young man and traveled to parts of the world where tattoos were already common. He returned to London and eventually opened up a tattoo shop near Waterloo Station. His early business was mostly sailors, but eventually he found work among European royals and the monied. King Frederick IX of Denmark, King George V and King Alfonso XIII of Spain were among his clients. Tattoos started to become fashionable.
His work included the usual dragons (influenced by Japanese tattoos), flags, warships and eagles, but also delicately-rendered nature butterflies, flowers and other natural objects. On paper, his designs showed a high degree of artistry, as in the image above. While we cannot see any of George Burchett’s tattoos in person (he died in 1953), we can see photos of those who had them. All of his tattoos, no matter how skillfully rendered, faded with time, much more dramatically than works on paper.
Burchett in his London studio
Burchett might be astonished at the popularity of his craft today. The idea that has fueled much of the normalization of tattoos is, however, something he would surely deeply support. That idea is the notion that tattoos are art. They are now called “body art” and extolled as a form of personal expression.
That tattoos involve artistic skills is beyond question.
The medium is living tissue. The process involves pain, blood letting and weeks of healing. But most tattoos involve drawing skill and through the dissemination of images, even highly detailed designs are available to greater numbers of people. A small and expensive number of tattoos involve great originality and craftsmanship.
But are tattoos truly art?
The answer is, people say, in the eye of the beholder. I would like to make the case against.
This idea that visual works rendered in ink injected into the second layer of the skin is “art” is a bit of pretentiousness that has unfortunately captured the minds of some very talented graphic artists, as well as the general public. With some serious consideration, we can see that this idea is false. Tattoos are never truly art, however much visual pleasure they may give. They do not qualify as art because the essence of art is the creation of beauty. Given the essential beauty and magnificence of one of the greatest works of art — the human body — a tattoo, which is by definition a nearly indelible mark on the body, is always a form of defacement.
Skin, even marred by common, natural imperfections or anomalies, is an organ of such miraculous inventiveness and artistry that it is almost impossible for us to appreciate all its facets. It encloses the watery, gelatinous, messy contents of the body. Who but the greatest of artists could conceive of such a container — so soft, so washable, so easily repaired?
But it’s more than an enclosure. It enables one of the five senses. Through touch we know our way around us, accomplish millions of tasks, feel the pain necessary to survival and experience indescribably intense pleasure.
It is impossible to go into any but a small part of the wonders of skin here, but there is one rarely-mentioned aspect of its awesomeness I would like to mention and that is relevant to this subject. On a visual level, the skin’s (almost) blankness is another stroke of divine genius. Imagine if we were checkered or striped. It works for animals and insects; not for human beings. Why is that so?
Without the relative blankness of this canvas, we could not so much appreciate the face, its amazing originality and expressiveness, especially in the eyes and the mouth. The face conveys a personal language of its own — even the face that is not conventionally beautiful.
The skin grants expressiveness to the entire body. We notice the personality in body movements, the way people walk and gesture, and the skin does not distract from this visual appraisal. This is why the body does not work as a moving billboard. When you see a billboard on a meadow, do you notice the meadow or the billboard? It is the same with tattoos.
The tattoo can only be a distraction and a detraction, in the same way that graffiti on the side of a building, even an ugly building, is never an improvement, no matter how artfully executed.
Tattoos are depersonalizing and therefore cannot be art because we are art.
Rather than being a form of individual expression, tattoos distract from what is truly original — the face, the physical manner and bearing. I have never seen an uninteresting face. Even uninteresting people have interesting faces, some fascinatingly bland.
Is it any surprise that the Romans and Greeks, with their famous idealization (and sometimes worship) of the human body, rejected tattoos except for slaves and criminals? They were not unfamiliar with the techniques of tattooing, but they also understood skin and its beauty. Imagine a tattoo on the man who posed for this first-century AD, Roman bust. It would be not body art, but body anti-art. It would distract from what was already there, what had formed from infancy through the mysterious impressions that thoughts and emotions make on the surfaces of the skin.
Think of all those magnificent Greek and Roman statues of athletes and warriors. Yes, they were idealizations, but the ideal was beautifully blank. Skin was so beautiful that only the finest marble could capture its suppleness.
Only people who have lost the sense of their inherent individuality and lost an appreciation for this sublime artistry of nature would find themselves in the hands of the “tattoo artist.”
All of George Burchett’s tattoos, no matter how skillfully rendered, faded with time, much more dramatically than works on paper. Such is the nature of ink injected into the skin. And all tattoos are destroyed before long. This canvas is indeed more ephemeral than the canvases of conventional painters.
It is just as well Burchett’s famous works are gone. They in no way made the world a more beautiful place.
"THE whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have the two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not so say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance or mutual check, in our Constitution." -- G. K. Chesterton
“Where were the teen-agers?,” Mr. John T. Stewart asked after he attended a performance of Shakespeare by the Old Vic Company at the American Theater in downtown St. Louis in the 1950s. He was writing about his 52 years of memories of theatergoing in St. Louis from 1906 to 1958. [John T. Stewart, “Golden Days of the Theater in St. Louis”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Nov. 12, 1958, p. 3H]
He continued: “Do they have no feeling or regard for the living stage? Do they really believe that what they see and hear on television is worthy drama? The student whose only impression of the art is taken from the movie screen or television set could not even imagine what was offered in the ‘good old days’…..”
Of course the answer to his questions was that concerted efforts were being made in the 1950s to separate the younger generation from the older, a project made easier by three cultural factors: The “youth revolution”, firmly in place by the 1950s; the increasing presence of television in Americans’ daily lives; and the promotion of a peculiar form of noise aimed at the young and called “rock and roll music”.
Those things were more than enough to eclipse any likelihood that teenagers would be able to understand the magical appeal of live theater.
“Television was hard on the little theater groups,” a woman said as she recalled her days in the 1940s-‘50s with the Trinity Dramatic Club, a church group in south St. Louis. It had the same effect on professional theater life. From our vantage point 75 years later, it is easy to see that canned entertainment readily available by turning dials and pushing buttons had the effect of softening up an entire generation. (more…)
"ILLEGAL Mexican migrant tells reporter ‘F**k the American people’ and laugher breaks out among other migrants. "The migrant, thought to be #cartels, told reporter they are in America to enjoy the good life American taxpayers provide. "He then says Americans are “racists” and “envious”, and he doesn’t respect them. "These are the people pouring into White countries, completely unopposed: they are filled with hatred, disrespect for the Natives while having entitlement." (Arminius News)
JEANETTE Leonard Gilder (1849-1916) was a successful author and journalist who worked for the Chicago Tribune,Boston Saturday Evening Gazette, Boston Transcript, Philadelphia Record and Press, and other newspapers.
She was one of many thousands of women opposed to the women’s franchise in the late 19th century, a founder of the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women.
Gilder argued that suffragists were utopians. Instead of a paradise on earth, they would, she argued, unleash “the wheels of purgatory.” The intensely religious zeal and impossibly bright hopes of a perfect future she believed women would bring to politics is all too familiar to us today.
IT has been quite a shock to people who do not know me, but who thought they did, to find me opposed to woman’s suffrage. Because I have been for so many years a working woman, and because the profession I chose is, or was at the time I entered it, supposed to be entirely a man’s profession, they thought I wanted all the privileges of men. But I don’t. You could have counted the women journalists on the fingers of one hand at the time I entered the ranks. Nowadays you could not find fingers enough in a regiment to count them on. There are now certain branches of journalistic work that are almost entirely given over to women, and women not only edit mere departments of daily papers, but there are those who edit the Sunday editions of some of the biggest dailies.
I am a great believer in the mental equality of the sexes, but I deny the physical equality. (more…)
"WITHOUT patience nothing can be conceived by the mind, nothing can be understood, nothing can be taught. For all things look to patience. Neither faith nor hope; neither justice nor humility; neither chastity nor honesty; nor concord; nor charity; nor any act of virtue; nor even the elements of nature; are able to hold together, or keep their consistency, without the nerve, restraint, and discipline of patience. Patience is always mature: it is humble, prudent, cautious, provident, and contented under every necessity that arises. Tranquil in the day of clouds and amidst the tempests of provocation, it allows nothing to disturb the serenity of the soul. The patient man knows of neither alteration nor regret. Who can say that he ever suffers loss? Whatever he has to endure, you will find him as complete at the end of his sufferings as though he had suffered nothing. How can we calculate the results of his patience? When he seems to have undergone defeat, we find he has got the victory." --- St. Zeno, De Patientia, c. I.
NGOs are smuggling immigrants into Europe on an industrial scale: 1. Migrant smugglers load up boats from Tripoli, Libya, deliberately using faulty boats with limited fuel 2. Faulty boats breaks down in Libyan water or nearby 3. NGOs stationed nearby pick them up and bring them to Italy NGOs serve as a pull factor of illegal immigration and often even operate in collusion with human smugglers. These organizations should be banned and criminalized. (Source: Arminius News)
In the past 10 years, nearly half of all states have boosted their thresholds for retail felony theft. Thirty-eight states now don’t consider shoplifting a felony unless $1,000 or more of merchandise gets stolen. A 2020 National Retail Federation report on organized retail crime found that two-thirds of retailers in states that had raised their felony shoplifting minimums reported growing retail theft. (Source/2019) (more…)
"[S]T. John Climachus observed that 'to the spiritual man patience is more essential than food,' and justly so; for food strengthens the body, and preserves it from weakness, but patience fortifies the soul, and without it no virtue can be firm and solid. But as we are bound to take more care of the soul than of the body, it is evident that we ought to be more solicitous for patience than for food. For, in the words of St. Peter Damian, 'the man whose patience breaks down may have other virtues, but he will never have their strength and solidity. Patience is concerned in all that we have to resist, in all that we have to deny ourselves, in all that we have to endure, in all that we have to adhere to, and in all that we have to do. This includes all human acts that bear the character of duty or devotedness, whether those acts be purely interior, or come forth into the exterior life and conduct. For wherever patience fails, the act is weak and the work imperfect. "This comprehensive view of the work of patience in man is enlarged upon by that profound thinker Tertullian in the following terms: 'Patience protects the whole will of God in man and enters into all His commandments. It fortifies faith, governs peace, helps charity, prepares humility, conducts to penance, leads to confession, rules the flesh, preserves the spirit,…
OBESITY is part of the dramatic cultural decline that has overtaken Ireland with the loss of its Catholic heritage. The country is on its way to becoming the fattest in Europe.
I HOPE this recording of the ever-popular second movement of Antonin Dvořák's Symphony No. 9, also known as the New World Symphony, fills you with affection for your country today. The symphony was composed in 1893 while Dvořák was the director of the National Conservatory of Music of America and was first performed in New York City. The Czech composer "wrote that he would not have composed his American pieces as he had if he had not seen America. It has been said that Dvořák was inspired by the 'wide open spaces' of America, such as prairies he may have seen on his trip to Iowa in the summer of 1893. Notices about several performances of the symphony include the phrase 'wide open spaces' about what inspired the symphony and/or about the feelings it conveys to listeners." (Source) The piece evokes so much that is beautiful about America -- things best said in sound.
THE organized riots in France are justified by the history of French colonization of Algeria. Rarely mentioned is the motivation for French involvement. The 19th-century military raid on Algiers was intended, in part, to stop the Barbary slave trade, which had enslaved so many Europeans from the 1500's to mid-1800s that population density along some parts of the coasts of Europe declined dramatically. The Regency of Algiers was one of the main bases of the Barbary pirates and Barbary Slave Traders who attacked Christian ships and coastal settlements in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic. Like the rest of the Barbary Coast, the Regency of Algiers lived from the trade of slaves or goods captured from Europe, America and sub-Saharan Africa. The European powers bombarded Algiers on different occasions in retaliation and the United States provoked the Barbary Wars in order to put an end to Algerian privateering against Christian shipping.[18] The conquest of Algeria began in the last days of the Bourbon Restoration by Charles X of France. It aimed to put a definite end to Barbary privateering and increase the king's popularity among the French people, particularly in Paris, where many veterans of the Napoleonic Wars lived. Algerian slave trade and piracy immediately ceased after the French conquered Algiers. (Source) Slavery in the American colonies was a piece of cake compared to slavery under the Ottomans. Boys and women were used as sex slaves and many slaves were worked to death. Robert Davis estimates that slave traders from Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli enslaved 1 million to 1.25 million Europeans in North Africa, from…
