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.

Anti-Semitism Is Evil Intentions Towards Jews

A group of Jews, including a small boy, is escorted from
the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers in this April 19, 1943 photo.
The picture formed part of a report from SS Gen. Stroop
to his Commanding Officer, and was introduced as evidence
to the War Crimes trials in Nuremberg in 1945. (AP Photo)
[Source: The Atlantic, Oct 16, 2011]

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

GalliaWatch writes:

Here's a must-read article posted in English at Front Page Magazine, and in French at Riposte Laïque. The author, Giulio Meotti describes the end of European Jewry, as Islam slowly but surely takes over. Whatever happens to the Jews, you can be sure, will happen to all of us.

I agree with the overall warning in her article, but I think we should look at anti-Semitism and its evil intentions towards Jews as something that happens to Jews. Of course, all evil eventually destroys what is before it. But, the intention of anti-Semitism is the destruction of Jews. I think we should be able to understand that without transferring it to us.

I do agree, though, that Islam has a more thorough system of elimination, and a wider span. Its strongest hatred is directed at Jews, but all other infidels follow. In terms of combating Islam, it is important to understand this method of elimination, because, yes, as Giulio Meotti writes, next are all the other infidels.

All Scrubbed Up

TD Centre Cows
[Photo by KPA]

These calm and lovely cows sit and mull over their surroundings.
Yesterday, they had more to look at. The Royal Bank building
in the background (whose windows are filled with pieces of
gold leaves) was glowing in the afternoon sun.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

These are my favorite animal sculptures in Toronto. They sit in front of the Toronto Dominion Centre, calmly (as cows are wont to do) gazing at passersby. Some stop and sit to eat their lunch, drink a coffee, or dialogue with a colleague. But most just walk hurriedly by them.

I brought a small bottle of orange juice as a respite from the unbreakable heat we have here (although not as bad as what our neighbors to the south are experiencing), and sat on one of the few stone benches scattered around the grounds.

There is construction going on in the area (and has been for about a year now), and a construction worker walked by me.

"Hello there," I called out a greeting.

"Hi," replied the busy man, walking on.

"Have you been working around here for long?" I persisted. "Don't you think these cows have been given a scrubbing recently?"

He stopped, and laughed. And looked back at the cows.

"Yes they do look cleaner. They just got moved back from another location."

"Yes, I know. Maybe they wanted them to look as good as new, now that they're back in their old place. Thanks, bye."

He went off chuckling.

Ghost Trains at City Hall

[Photos by John-Paul Palescandolo & Eric Kazmirek]. The link is to the website of the photographers, who write more technical information on how John-Paul Palescandolo took the photos.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Above are photographs of New York City's City Hall "ghost station" which was shut down in 1945. More photographs, plus some photographs of the opening day of the station, are at the Daily Mail.

From Wikipedia:

City Hall, also known as City Hall Loop, was the original southern terminal station of the first line of the New York City Subway, built by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), named the "Manhattan Main Line", and now part of the IRT Lexington Avenue Line. Opened on October 27, 1904, this station underneath the public area in front of City Hall [which] was designed to be the showpiece of the new subway...employing Romanesque Revival architecture. The platform and mezzanine feature Guastavino tile, skylights, colored glass tilework and brass chandeliers. Passenger service was discontinued on December 31, 1945, making it a ghost station, although the station is still used as a turning loop for 6 and [6] trains. [More at Wikipedia]

Drama In New York

Empire State Building Struck by Lightening

This is the kind of photo I wish I I had taken, since I do spend quite a bit of time trying to find interesting ways to photograph high rises. The one above was taken on June 22 by the news host bully Keith Olbermann. I'm not sure if the funnel of light on the right is due to camera problems or if it is related to the lightening (although it is probably a combination of both). I know lightening photos are a dime a dozen, but having the Empire State Building appear to emit the thread of light from its tip is both luck and perception. Well done, Keith!

Free Fall

Nico, Los Angeles, CA 1966
Photo by Lisa Law

I wrote about Nico, the odd, deep-voiced chanteuse of the Velvet Underground here. The photo I posted is actually a cropped version of an original by "rock" photographer Lisa Law. Nico has her feet (precariously) on the ground, as though she fell from the sky (or a tree). So even in my original interpretation of the cropped version, I was right that her movements showed the instability of someone wavering between free fall and stability.

Here is what Lisa Law, the photographer who took the black and white photo of Nico writes about her experience with mind altering paraphernalia. She was in good compaly with Nico.

Psychedelics assisted me in seeing that we are all one, not just us humans but everything on the planet, the animals, the trees, the water, the air, the earth, the plants. God is always present. It is a very humbling, unifying, heeling feeling that affected the way I looked at the rest of my life.

The first time I took LSD, Owsly's purple liquid, I knew life would never be the same.

Below is a much better photo of Nico. The freedom one associates with floating, swimming or being in water with all our senses in tact (which is how I like being near or in water) is not there. She is overwhelmed, and has a defiant, but frightened look, goading the water to come get her, as she probably does the heroin she used to smoke (shoot), and yet is petrified at the same time. Her behavior is not one of bravery, but of recklessness, as she well knows. Even Lou Reed writes in his heroin song: "Heroin, be the death of me."

Nico, 1967
Photo by Michael Ochs

All people want stability and beauty, amongst many other human (humane) necessities. Hippies are no exception. Law lived in a hippie commune called the Castle in San Fransisco, which she describes as a mansion. Below is a short transcript from her interview with journalist Tom Lyttle. I cannot find the date of the interview, but it looks like it is in the 1990s. The online version is a pdf article and is clearly a copy of an original. It is also available as an html online. This excerpt is from page eighteen if the article:

If the Factory [Warhol's New York studio] was a place that the beautiful people hung at...then the Castle was the West Coast version of that. Word traveled fast and in the two brief years that we were there, everybody came by to visit and hang out, partake, party, sing, make love, eat, write songs and dance their hearts out. Tom Law and John Phillip bought it with Jack Simons for mere $100,000 and had to sell it at a loss. John Getty owns it now.

Vultures like Law and Warhol collected their beautiful people only to desecrate and destroy them later. This is what Wikipedia says about Nico, after her initial glamor and beauty wore off:

Nico was a heroin addict for over 15 years. In the book Songs They Never Play on the Radio, James Young, a member of her band in the 1980s, recalls many examples of her troubling behaviour due to her "overwhelming" addiction...Shortly before her death, Nico stopped taking heroin and began methadone replacement therapy while also embarking upon a regimen of bicycle exercise and healthy eating.

Despite her career in music, she was deaf in one ear, which made it difficult for her to understand what others were saying.

On 18 July 1988, while on holiday with her son on the Spanish island of Ibiza, Nico had a minor heart attack while riding a bicycle and hit her head as she fell...[She] died at eight o'clock that evening. X-rays later revealed a severe cerebral hemorrhage as the cause of death.

Nico was buried in her mother's plot in Grunewald Forest Cemetery in Berlin. A few friends played a tape of "Mütterlein," a song from [her album] Desertshore , at her funeral.

Mütterlein
By Nico

Dear little Mütterlein
Now I may finally be with you
The longing and the loneliness
Redeem themselves in blessedness

The cradle is your homeland-dress
A gracefulness your glory
In ecstasy your heartbreak transforms
And reaches inside of the victorious tide

Beauty alone is not enough.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bob Dylan's Desk, the Castle, 1965
Photo by Lisa Law

Bob Dylan also stayed at the Castle. Above is a photo of a corner of his room by Lisa Law, beautiful and ordered, with a Tiffany style lamp, a patterned cloth on the table, and some small carved animals. He has a view.

The Castle, Los Angeles, 1965
Photo by Lisa Law

Above is the Castle where the hippies hung out. Beauty is clearly not wanting, including a sports car, meant for the rich and famous but why not for hippy squatters as well?

Drudge has an article about drug use (abuse) in contemporary teens from in the suburbs, and links to this Daily Mail article. Not crack or marijuana for these pampered adolescents, but heroin. These are the children of the sixties.

Post-Modernism Can Be Defeated!

A couple of days ago, I posted a photo of some highrise buildings from near the lakeshore. I identified one building as the Lombard Place. I went back again to have a closer look. I took shots of the interior of the building, which has an Art Deco feel. The building was actually completed in 1962, and functions as an office. Its architects, Bergman and Hamann, have a prolific portfolio around Toronto, including the Toronto Dominion Centre, which was a collaboration with Mies Van der Rohe, and the Eaton Centre, which was recently in the news.

I can't find anything on the interior ground floor ceiling, but it seems to be part of the original design.

Tall, lifeless glass buildings do not have to be part of a city's highrise cityscape. Ingenious designers can produce interesting buildings, as part of a city's cluster of buildings, and with interesting interiors. Post-modernism can be defeated!



[Photos by KPA]

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).

York Street at Adelaide, a few short blocks north of the lake shore

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).

Union Station at Front Street

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.

Lake Ontario Buoy Ring

[Photos by KPA]

"Leaves of Grass"

Leaves of Grass
Photo by KPA

"...observing a spear of summer grass."

Niagara Daisies

Niagara Daisies
[Photo by KPA]

Doors At Old City Hall

Doors At Old City Hall
[Photo by KPA]

Sliding Into Summer

Sliding into Summer in a Northern Country
[Photo by KPA]

Spring Flowers Fighting For Space

Lilacs and Cherry Blossoms
[Photo by KPA]

Sailing and Flying

[Photo by KPA]

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.

Cow Rumps

[Photo by KPA]

I had taken a photo of these placid cows at the Toronto Dominion Centre (the banking center of Toronto) about a year ago, but focused more on the business men than on the sculptures. Above is a recent view of those lovely animals, beautifully sculpted by Joe Farfard.

Spring Flowers at City Hall

Toronto's Old City Hall
[Photo by KPA]

Spring Flowers and a Bit of Toronto History

The Toronto Coach Terminal
[Photo by KPA]

The Toronto Coach Terminal, built in 1931 by architect Charles Dolphin, still stands as part of Toronto's history. It was once considered a grand building, but is now dwarfed by the downtown skyscrapers, and the inside has lost the grandeur of its heyday. Still, the building stands out in its own way on the boring strip of Dundas and Bay, and the interior is light and airy enough to make traveling by bus an exciting adventure.

Toronto Coach Terminal
[Source: Urban Toronto]

Toronto Coach Terminal in 1931, then known as the
Gray Coach Terminal, built in the Art Deco style by Charles Dolphin
[Source: Wikipedia]

Coach Terminal Opening in 1931.
Ribbon ceremony with W.H. Price, acting premier of Ontario
[Source: The Toronto Star Photo Gallery]

A Grey Coach Lines bus waiting to departing 1932
[Source: The Toronto Star Photo Gallery]

A Grey Coach Terminal Interior, 1931
[Image Source: City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 16, Series 71,
Item 9035, via Wikipedia]

A Grey Coach Terminal Interior, Now
[Image Source: Canadian Public Transit Board]

Back to Earth

Above are the incredible shots of the Space Shuttle Enterprise flying over New York City last Friday April 27. It was mounted on NASA's Shuttle Carrier Aircraft at Dulles International Airport for its final flight, landing at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at around 11:20 am.

But on the way, [the shuttle] thrilled thousands of spectators by flying at low-attitude above some of Manhattan's most iconic landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building and One World Trade Center, as it followed the Hudson River to the Tappan Zee Bridge and back.

The above quote is from the Daily Mail, which has more photographs of the spectacular event.

The dramatic clouds over New York fit the grandeur of the shuttle. And one great lady raises her arm in greeting to a great American enterprise, which is paying its respects to a great American city.

On a sour note, President Obama's funding cuts for NASA:

leaves NASA funded at its lowest level in four years, forcing the space agency to juggle priorities and "devastating planetary science," said Bill Nye, CEO of space exploration group The Planetary Society.[From Foxnews.com]

Hitler's Manhood

Time Magazine's issue of Hitler as Man of the Year

[Large image here, Click on linked image to magnify further]

The caption reads:

Man of 1938
From the Unholy Organist, a hymn of Hate

The illustration shows:

Organist Adolf Hitler playing his hymn of hate in a desecrated cathedral while victims dangle on a St. Catherine's wheel and the Nazi hierarchy looks on, was drawn by Baron Rudolph Charles von Ripper (see p. 20), a Catholic who found Germany intolerable.

The illustration is by Baron Rudolph Charles von Ripper [text of linked article is small, but the biography is the most complete I can find online]

Hitler on the cover of Time:
Top - Left: 1931, Right: 1933
Bottom - Left: 1936, Right: 1941

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A couple of days ago, the T.V. game show Jeopardy asked who was the Time Magazine Man of the Year for 1938 as its final question. Guess, if you don't know.

Unbelievably it was Hitler.

By 1938, there was enough information coming out of Germany to paint a viscous picture of Hitler's ambitions and rise to power, including his invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Below is a review of Hitler as he attains the leadership of the Nazi Party to his death by suicide in 1945.

On November 8th, 1923, Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or the Nazi Party for short, marched with 2,000 Nazis to disrupt a meeting at the Munich Beer Hall (known as the Beer Hall Putsch) to spark a "revolution." This failed. The following morning, Hitler and about 3,000 Nazis marched in Munich to take over the entire city. This was averted by the police. Hitler was arrested two days later at his hiding place in the attic of friends. He served only one of his five-year term. He wrote most of his Mein Kampf treatise while in prison. The book was published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926. There was no doubt what he thought about, and intended for, the "Jewish Question." In 1933, he was elected Chancellor of Germany by popular vote. In 1936, his government hosted the summer Olympic Games in Berlin, a prestigious recognition of his country by the world at large.

Hiter's aggressive leadership, his clear-cut anti-Semitism, his nationalistic politics to bring Germany to the forefront of Europe through Nazism, and his expansionary goals, were ignored or undermined by world leaders, despite enough (I could say ample) evidence.

The January 2 1939 edition of Time Magazine named him Man of the Year for 1938, as a world figure who "for better or for worse, ...has done the most to influence the events of the year." This ambiguous honor gave some legitimacy to Hitler's leadership by the world at large.

Here is more from the 1939 article in the magazine, describing Hitler:

[T]he figure of Adolf Hitler strode over a cringing Europe with all the swagger of a conqueror. Not the mere fact that the Führer brought 10,500,000 more people (7,000,000 Austrians, 3,500,000 Sudetens) under his absolute rule made him the Man of 1938...More significant was the fact Hitler became in 1938 the greatest threatening force that the democratic, freedom-loving world faces today.

In March 1938, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. On September 3, 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany, but with no military action against Germany. Hitler then invaded Norway and Denmark, and launched his blitzkrieg on Holland, Belgium and France by 1940. Churchill, who became Prime Minister of Britain in 1940, led the British to war against Germany with his June 1940 "Finest Hour" speech, and his famous line:

"I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin."

The Americans joined soon after, in December 1941

Hitler stayed in power from 1933 until the defeat of the Nazis in 1945. He had managed to convince the German people to elect him as their leader despite his aggressive and destructive coup on the German government more than ten years earlier. His stint in prison was forgotten. His book, Mein Kampf, failed to alert the public of his true intentions. His invasions were initially downplayed by foreign nations. News, reports, and perhaps more importantly anecdotes by Jewish dissidents to America on this treatment of Jews in Germany, including stories of Jews being rounded up for labor/concentration camps, were ignored or downplayed.

On November 9, 1938, his SA stormtroopers conducted two days of destruction and pogrom on Jewish neighborhoods using as a pretext the shooting of a German Embassy staff in Paris by Herschel Grynszpan, a young Jewish student. Grynszpan was retaliating against the deportation of his parents from Germany to Poland. Although the international community condemned this Germany-wide pogrom, or Kristallnacht as it is known, some by cutting off diplomatic relation with Germany, Hitler suffered no serious consequences. The world didn't take his clearly displayed Jewish animosity as a precursor to his impending aggressions.

Hitler himself said in a public speech in January 1939:

"If international-finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging the nations into yet another world war, the consequences will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe."

His speech was included in

the 1940 Nazi propaganda movie The Eternal Jew (Der ewige Jude), whose purpose was to provide a rationale and blueprint for eliminating the Jews from Europe. [Source: Wikipedia]

It would take Britain and France another eight months after Time's honor of Hitler before they would declare war on Germany, and another nine months before Winston Churchill would lead the fight.

I don't think there is a Hitler analogy in our era, and I sincerely hope there never will be. Yet, I keep coming back to the Muslim presence in the West. We may never have a Muslim leader in a Western country like Canada or the US since Muslim culture is just too different from Western culture. But we have enough multicultural propagandists and liberal equality mongers who work around the clock to convince the public that Muslims in our countries are part of that wonderful, peaceable smorgasbord of peoples, and that letting more of them into our liberated, free and equal lands should be part of our mission. Soon, Muslim will have built up a mass that will work in tandem to wreak real havoc on our societies, and not with just the occasional bombs that blow apart buildings and people.

Sam Solomon, a former Sharia expert and converted Christian, seems to have similar ideas to mine. I discuss here his book Modern Day Trojan Horse: Al-Hijra, The Islamic Doctrine of Immigration, Accepting Freedom or Imposing Islam? on Islamization and the Umma. Below is an excerpt from his book:

The beginning phase of Islamization usually includes activities pivotal to building a physical presence. It consists of public calls to prayer; founding of schools, libraries and research centers; and the teaching of Arabic -- actions that appear to be reasonable and respectable infrastructure requirements necessary to support the presence of a faith. At this point in the Hijra ["immigration designed to subvert and subdue non-Muslim societies and pave the way for eventual, total Islamization"], it is permissible for Muslims to engage in haram, or forbidden actions, out of necessity to establish and empower the umma or Muslim community. Koranic rules such as the prohibition against friendships with infidels are suspended while the objectives of future Islamization are systematically put into place. In its initial phase, the Hijra passes scrutiny by the West whose citizens erroneously view the migration as mainly economic -- a pilgrimage for a better life.

Just as the Nazis prepared the German people over the years about the evilness of the Jews, and concurrently built up their war machine, Muslims are building their societies in our Western shores by giving us a false image of their peaceful and integrationist intentions, while strengthening their powers. And Jews are also their great nemesis. Jews are like the canary in the coal mine, showing the approaching dangers. It is up to us to pay attention to this virulent anti-Semitism that is in the fabric of Islam, and which is surfacing in other, non-Islamic bodies and groups. Sam Solomon understands this link between anti-Semitism and Islam, and discusses it in his second book Eternal Islamic Enmity and the Jews, which I briefly review here.


Photo above:

A group of Jews, including a small boy, is escorted from the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers in this April 19, 1943 photo. The picture formed part of a report from SS Gen. Stroop to his Commanding Officer, and was introduced as evidence to the War Crimes trials in Nuremberg in 1945. (AP Photo) [Source: The Atlantic. Oct 16, 2011]

Slothful City

Pedestrians on Fifth Avenue in midtown
Alfred Eisenstaedt
1942

Below are some photos of New York City that the ever-diligent photographers at NYC Daily Pictures recently posted. I think they are good images, capturing beautiful sun light making the building glow on the top photo; the background curtain of the Pan Am building in the distance in the second photo; trees, flags and signs making patterns in the third photo; and the Empire State looming in the background in the fourth.

Yet, look at the people. They are an overweight, under-dressed, slothful lot. In one of the most beautiful cities in the world (well, some wold say handsome), we have the ugliest women, or the women dressed in the ugliest manner, walking down its avenues.

Compare these photos of the enlightened 21st century with the one at the top of the blog. It was taken in 1942 by Alfred Eisenstaedt (the photographer who took the famous V–J Day in Times Square photograph). One could argue that midtown Fifth Avenue is not the same as the downtown, more bohemian Fifth Avenue that NYC Daily Pictures has posted, and that midtown Fifth Avenue women are smart, even in 2012. But here is a link to shoppers by Saks Fifth Avenue, and it is the same story of jeans, shapeless coats and dreary colors. Once again, the building outshines the pedestrians. In the pre-slothful era, extending to the 1940s period of Eisenstaedt photograph and into the 1950s, women complemented the buildings around them, looking worthy to walk beside them.

1 World Trade Center- view from 6th Avenue in Chelsea

Park Avenue South - view from Union Square, NYC

Broadway at Herald Square, 35th Street, NYC

Monday morning at Fifth Avenue. Chelsea, NYC

[Above photos from NYC Daily Pictures]