“ROTHKO’s skill in rendering the human form was poor, which is evident in early works like Bathers or Beach Scene (Untitled) (1933/4). [Author Simon] Schama admits as much, noting that: “When he [Rothko] stood in the Brooklyn [Jewish Center] classroom [where he taught art classes from 1929–46] it all seemed so easy. He would tell the children not to mind the rules — painting, he said, was as natural as singing. It should be like music but when he tried it came out as a croak. It’s the work of a painfully knotted imagination. No not very good.”According to the general consensus, Rothko “never stood out as a great draughtsman and could even at times appear clumsy in the execution of his oil paintings.”

“Rothko, in a speech in the mid-thirties, offered a quasi-philosophical rationale for the unimportance of technical skill, stressing “the difference between sheer skill, and skill that is linked to spirit, expressiveness and personality.” He insisted that artistic expression was “unrelated to manual ability or painterly technique, that it is drawn from an inborn feeling for form; the ideal lies in the spontaneity, simplicity and directness of children.” Such grandiloquent pronouncements from Rothko were not unusual, with Collings noting that “Rothko was outrageously over-fruity and grandiose in his statements about art and religion and the solemn importance of his own art.”

“This tendency on his part prompted one writer to declare: “What I find amazing … is how a painting which is two rectangles of different colors can somehow prompt thousands upon thousands of words on the human condition, Marxist dialectics, and social construction.” He suggests a good rule of thumb is “the more obtuse terms an artist and his supporters use to describe a work, the less worth the painting has.  By this definition Rothko may be the most worthless artist in the history of humanity.”

— Brenton Sanderson, “Rothko, Abstract Expressionism and the Decline of Western Art,” 2020 (more…)

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ALAN writes:

Recently I spoke with a woman who grew up in St. Louis in the 1950s, as did I.  She was educated in Catholic schools, as was I, but in neighborhoods far apart.

She told me she had two aunts who enjoyed shopping downtown. They did not drive, so they depended on the streetcars or buses to take them downtown and back.  Occasionally they took a taxi.

One day, she told me, they called a taxi company and said, “White driver, please.”

Can’t you hear the “Liberals” howling “Evil and indefensible!”?

It did not seem that way to my acquaintance when she was a girl in the 1950s. But it seems that way to her now. She professes to be shocked by what her aunts said.  She seems to think it was a BAD THING to say and to do.  That, of course, is the standard “Liberal” dogma that has been pounded into Americans for the last 70 years.  Apparently my acquaintance absorbed that dogma and now believes her aunts were guilty of WRONG-THINK and WRONG-SPEAK.  Apparently she sees nothing wrong when government busybodies forbid Americans today to make and act upon the kinds of choices her aunts and other Americans made routinely in the 1950s.

Excuse me, but I see everything wrong with it. I contend not only that there is nothing wrong with “White driver, please”, but that her aunts had an inalienable right to say it and stand by it.  It is an exercise in freedom of choice. It does not prevent anyone else from choosing any taxi driver he desires.

To believe otherwise is, in effect, to annul common sense, the principle of individual rights, freedom of choice and freedom of association in an open marketplace, and the principle of limited government.  And for what?  For the limitless expansion of government power on the pretext of “hurt feelings” claimed by people who want something for nothing.

If you think you do not “discriminate”, think again.  If you are alive and want to remain that way, then you must discriminate endlessly. (more…)

[Reposted from June, 2014 — Happy Father’s Day to all fathers who find their way to this site.]

FATHER’S DAY brings to mind a father I never knew. My father-in-law, Frank Wood, was dead — and had been dead for ten years — by the time I married my husband 27 years ago.

Though I never met him, it’s not as if I don’t know him. I think I know him pretty well and if he walked in the front door today, I would probably recognize him and know exactly what to offer him. However, I don’t think he would walk in the door if he were alive. He was a man bound to his home and his neighborhood for all but two weeks of the year.

I have a vivid image of him, sitting at the kitchen table on a Sunday evening, having spent a weekend of leisure both at home and at the Eagle Club nearby, and announcing to the assembled at dinner, “Well, the ball game’s over now.” He has told his last story and retold his last joke. He has read his last detective story and flipped the pages of his last adventure magazine. He is approaching his final bites of “rope beef.” Those words on Sunday night signaled that his extended time at home was over and the new week, when he would return to the shipyard where he worked as a machinist, had begun. (more…)

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“FOR, it was not with him as with other men, the pulsations of whose hearts are, at first, the consequence of nothing but the vital power which is in the human frame; and, later on, when age has awakened reason into act, the ideas so produced will produce physical impressions on us, which will, now and then, quicken, or dull, the throbbings of these our hearts. With the Man-God it was not so: his Heart, from the very first moment of its life, responded, that is, throbbed, to the law of his soul’s love, whose power to act upon his human Heart was as incessant, and as intense, as is the power of organic vitality,—a love as burning at the first instant of the Incarnation as it is this very hour in heaven. For the human love which the Incarnate Word had, resulting as it did from his intellectual knowledge of God and his creatures, was as perfect as that knowledge, and, therefore, as incapable of all progress; though, being our Brother, and our model in all things, he, day by day, made more manifest to us the exquisite sensibility of his divine Heart. (more…)

“IF I WANTED to destroy a functional society — the sort that white Europeans have built and maintained for millennia — upending the family and harming children would be a high priority. Attacking a society’s children is far easier than other groups and offers significant benefits to those wishing harm. If you can get children to turn on their families ideologically, you can likely get them to do anything you want as they mature. Thus, if I wanted to sever the roots of a people and mold them into obedient serfs, I would start by attacking the children.

“Ensuring that a people’s youth is riddled with guilt and feels a deep sense of disdain for their own identity, family, and race is a crucial measure in the continued destruction of our society. The effects of such learned shame are profound, producing an entire generation — or generations — with no true sense of identity or history.

“White children in contemporary society face a hostile onslaught from nearly every direction. Although we inhabit the same world as they do, they face considerably more antagonism, and their experiences are far more unpleasant. The world they must navigate has changed drastically since I became an adult, less than 20 years ago. White children today must deal with the same crime, hostile media, and racial tensions that we do, but from a more vulnerable place, and face additional stressors such as anti-white teachers and racial bullying at school. All of this coalesces into forms of harm, trauma, and terror for white children that are difficult to understand fully. This essay therefore seeks to understand the history and experience of white children in our society today.”

— Richard Houck, “The War Against White Children,” Part 1 (more…)

CANADIAN doctor William Makis, M.D., is the best source I have found on COVID vaccine injuries and deaths. I highly recommend paying the small fee to subscribe to his posts on Substack. He brings medical expertise and high journalistic standards to the numerous and undeniable reports. He is not sensational. He is essentially amassing a vast criminal file. Overwhelmingly, the victims of these crimes did not give informed consent. Please support the work of this courageous doctor.  

[Reposted]

ALAN writes:

It stood on high ground, and the domed cupola atop the administration building was a landmark for river boat pilots on the Mississippi River. Its roots extended back to post-revolutionary France and a group of women who committed themselves to a love of God and the education of women, both rich and poor.

The Maryville Academy of the Sacred Heart in south St. Louis was a Catholic boarding school for girls — and later a college — that occupied four square blocks in what is now called the Dutchtown neighborhood. Though it attracted wealthy students, a separate school on the campus was free and open to the poor.

“With its educational roots in France, the school was based on a six-year French Lycée pattern — which included the equivalent of junior college work at the two highest levels,” according to the official history of what is now Maryville University (an entirely different institution). “Many French customs prevailed throughout the school, from the celebration of traditional French holidays (congés) to the games students played after school hours (a glorified hide and seek known as cache-cache) and even the daily snacks, or goûter. The French language was taught at all levels, and girls were encouraged to speak it at all times, especially during meals.

“School activities included lectures, recitals, concerts and even early ‘moving pictures.’ So complete was the education taught at the Academy, that—by 1900—women who continued their education after leaving the school were receiving college credit for their last two years there. By 1910, enrollment had reached 181, more than double its original.”

The school was in Dutchtown from 1872 to 1961, becoming a four-year college for women (and later men) in 1923.  Photographs can be viewed here and here. They include this photo of the college’s main building: (more…)

"EARTHLY riches are like the reed. Its roots are sunk in the swamp, and its exterior is fair to behold; but inside it is hollow. If a man leans on such a reed, it will snap off and pierce his soul." ---- St. Anthony of Padua  

"MEN will surrender to the spirit of the age. They will say that if they had lived in our day, faith would be simple and easy. But in their day, they will say, things are complex; the Church must be up to date and made meaningful to the day's problems." ---- St. Anthony of Padua  

FROM The Toronto Sun: Certainly, foul play is not suspected in all of Quebec’s fires. But the ones which began in the small village of Chapais — in the northeast section of the province — are being probed. “It is suspicious,” said one business owner there. “It is believed that some of these fires here were deliberately set.” [...] “As we speak, we think that certain elements that stand out may suggest that these fires may be linked. There are a few things that seem suspicious,” Mayor Isabelle Lessard told the local le Quotidien newspaper. “The SQ is investigating in order to make validations, then to see what is happening and if there is a criminal cause behind it, but we are still in validation.” While police have been told of unexplainable movements of people in the town, police stress the need for everyone to be patient.  

ALMOST every time a middle-class, white American walks into a major store and makes a purchase, he is paying people who despise him.

The corporation that owns that store despises the family that created him (not to mention the very biological order of procreation), the race he belongs to, the way of life of his ancestors and the innocence of his children. The corporation makes no effort to hide this disdain. It advertises it relentlessly. In fact, it is an unspoken law that no ad must contain a visible majority of the people who made this country and most ads must promote the diminishment of that race through intermarriage.

Every time a middle-class American walks into a major bank he encounters the same smile-cloaked hostility. The levers of power, of which that bank is a part, have moved hundreds of thousands of often illiterate, non-English-speaking foreigners into this country to provide cheap labor — or simply to live on welfare — and hundreds of thousands of the compliant educated from around the world to take good jobs. The former constitute an immense underclass of ethnic groups who soon will be battling each other, subsidized by the hated white middle-class American. (more…)

"FLY from the world, and commence by trampling under your feet all human respect. Do not blush to be a servant of Christ. Regard this world with the same horror that the sight of a criminal suspended from a gibbet would awaken in you. Know that the atmosphere of the world is polluted with the foul odor of thousands of sins that are constantly committed, and which can be washed away only by tears of blood." --- St. Paul of the Cross, Flowers of the Passion  

CORPORATIONS celebrate homosexuality because it is good for business. It's that simple. When moral probity and rootedness in family are lessened, people are more likely to find consolation in things. They will buy and borrow more. The more people stumble in the dark of uninhibited desires, the less likely they are to see and identify the great evil of usury, the system of debt that progressively disarms all opposition. The less people apply reason to the control of their strongest instincts, the less likely they are to use reason at all. The morally compromised cannot oppose evil, including blatant and systematic theft. Here is an artful scam, using the language of love and tolerance to pull the wool over its victims' eyes. Get everyone in the club -- and you control them. The rainbow is a symbol of tyranny. Those snared in the trap of homosexuality are only pawns. The modern world is the devouring, apocalyptic Beast -- and almost everyone is being ripped off. Indeed, we are all in this together.