JOHN MICHAEL COOPER is the wedding photographer who coined the term “trash the dress” and set off a “new creative, artistic, movement in the world of wedding photography” with his portraits of a bride in a flaming wedding gown. Instead of “trash the dress,” I suggest “trash the photographer” – and every other purveyor of the modern, highly-stylized, narcissistic, mind-blowingly expensive wedding, which turns couples into mock celebrities or even porn stars for a day. Wedding photographers, with some notable exceptions, are the used car salesmen of modern romance.

Here is Cooper responding to remarks that his work is perverse and sickening. This vulgar philistine is actually considered a bright light in the world of commercial photography: (more…)

IN THIS recent post, I discussed a piece in the Wall Street Journal advocating “child-focused divorce,” which is sort of like “homeowner-focused burglary.” I said that any couple capable of following Elizabeth Bernstein’s advice should be capable of staying married. In this excellent letter to the editor, a reader of the WSJ makes the same point:

In “the Child-Focused Divorce” (Personal Journal, Sept. 6) you imagine a world where divorced parents cooperate with an abundance of civility, mutual respect and charity, and you offer advice from experts who liken raising children of divorce to a kind of “business venture.” You encourage attention to details, planning, coordination and even a kind of professional respect between the parents.

As a child of divorce, I found this almost laughable. (more…)

  RESPONDING to recent posts here about ugly architecture, Daniel H., at his blog Out of Sleep, advises individuals to cultivate resistance in small ways.

DAN, in a note to Lawrence Auster, writes:

To see how far suicidal liberalism has crept into the clerical establishment of the Catholic Church one only need to review the recent statements of a German bishop praising the construction of mosques in Germany:

The Hamburg auxiliary bishop Hans-Jochen Jaschke has called for the construction of new mosques in Germany. At the same time he called on Christians symbolically to support the opening of such buildings. “I think that it is conceivable that Christians will give Muslims presents at the opening of a new mosque — as a sign of sympathy, good neighbourliness and religious solidarity,” said the spokesperson for the German Bishop’s conference for interfaith dialogue as reported in Hamburg’s daily paper, Die Welt. (more…)

BRIAN writes:

From your posts on “trash-the-dress,” you obviously don’t understand what it’s all about.

Firstly, there are two totally different types of trash-the-dress photoshoots.

The most common one has the intention of taking beautiful photos of the bride (and sometimes the groom as well) away from the overly sterile traditional settings. Some of these photographs are truly beautiful and far from being anti-traditional actually hark back to very old styles of photography. These may or may not include stunning water scenes. In many cases the beauty of the bride is emphasized by the use of contrasting backgrounds, such as an industrial type background. In nearly all these cases, the dress is not truly “trashed” and can be dry cleaned. (more…)

IS it possible to draw a clear line between modern anti-Semitism and reasonable criticism of Jewish leftism? In this excellent 2005 piece, Lawrence Auster wrote:

It is essential to distinguish between anti-Semitic attacks on Jews and legitimate, rational criticisms of Jews. For example, to say that many Jews fear some fictional white evangelical anti-Semitism more than they fear Islamic anti-Semitism, and to say that this belief is both wrong in itself and harmful to society, as Stephen Steinlight has argued, and I expanded on the argument, is a legitimate criticism. It does not demonize Jews as Jews. (more…)

THE AUSTRALIAN government announced today that passports will be changed to offer three gender options: male, female and indeterminate.

Here’s my question.

Given that being of “indeterminate” sex is purely wishful thinking, why don’t passports add more options? What if you consider yourself an angel? Or a goddess? (more…)

JEANETTE V., who is a professional photographer, writes:

Regarding the wedding dress, it is the “fashion” these days to do a “trash the dress” shoot after the wedding. I suppose a bride will ask me eventually to photograph her doing this to her dress. I don’t get it, I took great care to save my dress for my future daughter.

Another fad is the “cake smash,” where a child is photographed destroying his first birthday cake. (more…)

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

The Chastity/Chaz Bono topic has a personal resonance with me. Decades ago, I was a grocery-store worker in Malibu, where I grew up. Occasionally my boss asked me to deliver groceries to celebrities who did not want to be bothered by fans and preferred not to come into the supermarket. One of them was Cher, who used to answer the door with her toddler-daughter in hand. The distance between that distinctly female toddler-daughter and the hulking weird pseudo-male of today is one measure of how utterly perverse the project called postmodernism really is. (more…)

JOHN E. writes:

Megyn Kelly seems to be a sign, one of many, of women who are out-of-place. She is doing what women excel at, and accomplish so beautifully in the proper context, which is to accept another unconditionally. The problem is that there are circumstances, many circumstances in our day, for which unconditional acceptance is among the last things that are needed, and Bono’s are such circumstances. Ms. Kelly is thrusting her womanly strength onto a situation in which it has no place, and in so doing, demonstrates how this strength becomes a weakness. (more…)

THIS IS a Charles Cushman photo of three homeless men in Battery Park in June 1941. By today’s standards, these men are dressed up. It seems even homeless men once had wives to take care of them.

Looking at these other photos of New York in the 1940s, one sees how dress dignifies ordinary life.

(more…)

  READING THE NEWS, you would think our economy was dead, as if America had nothing. Fred Owens writes about visiting an olive orchard in the Ojai Valley of California. It has not rained in the Ojai Valley since May and yet the olives are doing fine.

FACED WITH girls wearing skirts too short and revealing, some British schools are resorting to bans on skirts. One headmaster told the LA Times that he had no choice but to change the dress code. “It just means that teachers can concentrate on what’s important in education.”

But what could be more important?

The answer is not to ban skirts. But to make girls girls again.

(more…)

THE EDMONTON SUN ran this photo the other day with the following caption:

A light-hearted photo by the Edmonton’s Sun chief photographer Tom Braid is the Photo of the Week choice. The trend of destroying the wedding dress as part of a bride’s photo album has emerged within the last decade, and this very bubbly, fun photo will no doubt become a centrepiece of this bride’s memories for years to come. (more…)

  AT VFR, the commenter Gintas writes the following about the Center for Gender and Sexuality and its well-paid commissars: The sexual revolution is a sexual boot camp--tear down the old man, rebuild him in a new image, a new man totally obedient to new masters. The goal is to sweep away all virtue, truth, beauty, and turn man in every way into a rutting animal with no thought above his immediate urges. Does not Katherine Franke herself talk like that, but with the obfuscating Cultural Marxism of a modern educrat? And does not the faculty of the Columbia Law School Center for Gender and Sexuality look like the drill instructors of the sexual boot camp?

A READER, Joe, sent this note today to Megyn Kelly of FoxNews:

At lunch, I got bored watching CNBC and Fox Business so I flipped the news channels to your program. Your interaction with [Dr. Keith] Ablow was astounding. Mind blowing. 

You militantly argued with him, invoking that damnable “hater” terminology of the Bolsheviks, about Chastity Bono and (her) appearance on some dancing program.  (more…)

  FROM British Paintings.

ERIC writes:

If Columbia Law School Professor Katherine Franke thinks “the public sphere may be the last refuge for sexual liberty,” she must never have seen the Folsom Street Fair. And if she ever tells me that our discourse needs to be any raunchier, I will tell her to [obscenity deleted.] I bet that line would make a schoolmarm out of her. (more…)