What is "art"? (cartoons, illusions...)

Amber Larson, CC Liu, and Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly; the artist Saara (Arkiharha)

Saara (Arkiharha) pondering art and free expression in Finland (Weekday-Illusion)

 

The fun Finnish cartoonist, devi, and graphic artist noticed our coverage. Saara is an obscure but prolific talent. We love her work, which can be found at many outlets like such as Arkiharha and such as Weekday-Illusion (our nod to awkward beauty pageant contestant Miss South Carolina).
 
She is expressing herself in her work and in a letter to us:

 

"Susse" (Saara/Arkiharha/flickr)

"Wow, it's crazy to find a post full of my pictures and comics! Nice analysis, too. Maybe I kinda succeeded to pass on my thoughts in a visual way, because you get the idea from most of them -- even when they are written in Finnish!"
 
See Wisdom Quarterly coverage here: My cartoon ART is your perception

REPLY: Saara, send in art you are eager for the world to see, like your beautiful sketches of the Buddha. We would be overjoyed to feature more.

 

Comic vignettes as art "Kuva" (Saara/Arkiharha/flickr)

If you have "class" you know a bottle of "fine" wine and classical string instruments like a Stratavarious are the only things to sip or listen to. But you're wrong. Science says you're wrong. So surely when you add that only oil on canvas can be art and not no people pleasing cartoony comics, you're wrong, too. Don't tell us. We like classical. Tell it to science:

 

The way to get people to better enjoy craapy fermented grape juice that sells for thousands of dollars is to say it sells for more. Just a better bottle and a price change, or serving it with an elegant story of its venerable origins, its pedigree, is enough to make it "taste" better. How classy of study participants.

Can comics and webcam colors be called art?

fMRI scans prove bad alcohol actually tastes better when it's two-buck-chuck krup is said to be something more expensive and classy. Expensive wine tastes better. Let's call it "neuromarketing." Marketers have known about this effect for years regarding other foods. Before they started loading fruit juices with added flavorants (cynically called "natural flavors" not because they're natural but because they synthetically mimic something "natural" rather than something artificial) and artificial colorants.

My doggy, my doggy...oh, you've come back! "Sarjis 12.8"  (Saara/Arkiharha/flickr)

 

Vegan Food Fest, Los Angeles

Flavorless red colors make things taste better. Blindfolded we might not be able to tell a difference or say which drink is what fruit. We use color as a clue, and it works. The flavor of dull tasting juice is brightened just by brightening its color. Such is the illusion we live in and the hypnotic states we fall into every other moment.

If we would meditate, we could emerge and be dehypnotized.

Hungry ghost, psychic ("Bobb")

But we love our illusions, delusions, and dreams. And we would directly-personally-verifiably find that we are (w)holistic beings, not mind (intangible processes)/body (senses) possessing spirits like it seems.

 

Today a study is making headlines saying that an old Stradavarius violin sounds no better than a modern one. In fact, if one believes this study, the modern one sounds better. More musicians prefer it. (But maybe they are voting for the one they think is the Strad which is the one they fear the study would find inferior?)

The Distortions

It's all how we look at the world we are creating each and every without realizing what we're choosing. Art can sensitize and teach us as we clear our mental perception of the distortions/perversions (Wisdom Quarterly). "Hiljattain päivitetty" (Saara/Arkiharha).

Audio Test: Can we tell the difference between expensive and overpriced instruments?

I'm a Mexican Buddhist...in LA/LA Land (video)

Crystal Quintero, Ashley Wells, CC Liu, Pfc. Sandoval, Wisdom Quarterly (Part 2)

"LA/LA"? Welcome to LA LA Land: Los Angeles, Latin America (sweetnrawme.com)

If I were Frieda Kahlo

LOS ANGELES, Latin America - The Getty is preparing to launch an art exhibit that accentuates the embarrassment of artistic riches we have in Los Angeles, which not everyone realizes is in Latin America.

It is for a lot of reasons. Not only did it used to be Mexico until European Invaders during U.S. War on the Spanish annexed it like Ukraine, it is again predominantly Latin American.

Buddhists discovered America before Columbus

Although Asians are the fastest growing ethnicity in the U.S., more Latinas and Latinos live in California than any other group.

Most are not Mexican Buddhists anymore, but a lot are. And it's amazing to find out that there is a connection between the Native Americans, First Nations people, and Mexicans (Aztecs, Maya or Mayans, Toltecs, Olmecs, Incas, and many others) from neighboring Mexico, Mesoamerica, and Central America.
 

The famous "Mayan Calendar" is Aztec

It will be a long time before that information goes mainstream.

But it takes awhile for the truth to surface. In 1885 Edward P. Vining published the facts about inglorious Columbus and the Afghan Buddhist missionaries, led by the Chinese Buddhist monk Hwui Shan (Hui Shen), who arrived in America in the 5th century. America is the Fusang they discovered. So everyone will have to settle for the Getty's Pacific Standard Time 2017.

• Buddhism arrived in Mexico before Christianity
• The 1%: London has the most billionaires followed by Moscow and NY
• L.A. makes list of richest cities behind San Francisco
• The Chinese discovered America (Hendon Harris)

Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA

Getty Foundation (getty.edu)

TheGetty and the Getty Foundation: Art and Art History in Los Angeles (getty.edu)

If I were a leftist Aztec warrior marching through the streets of Los Angeles (latimes.com)

 
In the fall of 2011 Los Angeles celebrated the launch of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, an unprecedented collaboration of arts institutions across Southern California joining together to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene.
 

If I were Irish-Mexican like Peter (as Che)*

Yet it was 230 years earlier, in 1781, that the city of Los Angeles itself was born when El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles [de Porciúncula] was founded as part of New Spain. [A pueblo like that of the Puebloan Buddhists!]

Thus, while Los Angeles [the "City of Angels"] often represents the vanguard of contemporary culture in the United States, it is at the same time a Latin American city of long duration.

 

If I went to BofA or KA

Today, nearly half of the population of Los Angeles has roots in Latin America, contributing to Southern California as a lively center of artistic production and a natural nexus of cultural creativity between North and South. 

 

In recent years a number of exhibitions in the Americas and Europe have offered an introduction to the original and varied heritage of Latin America and the Latin American diaspora.

Now there is an opportunity for a broader and deeper examination of this art through a renewed collaboration by the Pacific Standard Time partners. In the process, Southern California will play a significant role in the research and presentation of Latin American art. More

Buddhism was in Mexico before Christianity (PRI video)

• Awake the Nation: United We Stand across USA
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Review: Pussy Riot in L.A. (video)

Amber Larson, Seth Auberon, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly;  Library Foundation L.A. (lfla.org)

Nadia T. (right) and fellow Pussy Riot member post-prison; Euro TV (RTE 1) last month (S).

 

What were we expecting to find at author (Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot) Masha Gessen's Pussy Riot lecture in LA? Riot Grrrl protests in a staid building in the middle of the largest library in town? There were crowds taking advantage of the extra hour afforded by daylight savings time. It was cool and breezy, yet there was not a single balaclava in the audience. DayGlo hair yes, "Free Pussy Riot" teeshirts yes, feminists yes. Activists? Not so much. No nude protesters, no riot police, no mobs of newsmen after photos of topless demonstrators.
 

Don a balaclava and you, too, are Pussy Riot

The capacity crowd was here to be intellectually stimulated by researcher Masha Gessen, who somehow managed to survive gay and out in increasingly draconian Russia. She relayed the arresting details of a sham trial that was a "trial" only in one sense: The Pussy Riot defendants got to read their own prepared statements near the end. It almost brought us to tears as Nadia (pictured above, right), who conceived of a Wee-wee (later changed in English to Pussy) Riot, a radical feminist art protest collective, read a statement that explained our whole reason for working on Wisdom Quarterly: American Buddhist Journal. Nadia speaks for us by her brave court statements. She was a philosophy major, after all.

 

(HBO Special) "A Punk Prayer" the American Pussy Riot documentary

 

We got to hear first hand from Gessen how Putin is, indeed, a dictator the likes of which have not been seen since George W. Bush stole a pair of American elections. (She is also the author of Man Without a Face: Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin).

He appointed himself "president" three times then rigged elections after the fact to confirm and legitimize the appointment. He was suffering from a great deal of unpopularity, particularly at the time Pussy Riot was singing a "Punk Prayer" (see entire HBO special above) against him in the former empire's most famous Christian church.

Russian Buddhist temple (Alexey Savransky)

(The Buddhist temples, such as the famous monastery in Elista, tend to be in the east, in Europe's only indigenously Buddhist country, Kalmykia, which is part of Russia). But, Gessen pointed out, traditionally the Eastern Orthodox Church has always been the last resort of scoundrels in officially atheist Russia.
 

If Imperialist Hillary says so

Russia was never actually atheist; that was just the official party line, and most Russians were never members of the official party, which was for elites. The Church was always there to back a dictator if called upon, according to Gessen. (This was because the KGB killed or defrocked any resistors within the Church then replaced them with spies and cronies, much like our American mainstream media).

Protesting Putin, promoting Pussy Riot (FP)

Putin has only recently seen his numbers skyrocket because of his incursions into Ukraine and Crimea, moves which most Russians seem to approve. Moscovites and Kremlin insiders certainly love it, as do the very rural areas of the country. Why? As Gessen reveals, 85% of Russia is wholly dependent on state-run media [and, we would guess, the other 15% is involved in making and/or disseminating that media].

 

But now, as of the day of her lecture, it's worse. What little independent media there was has been dismantled in the past two weeks. Since Sochi things have only gotten worse. Pussy Riot activists have been attacked, as aided and abetted by the police state. But Russia has never known democracy or any real freedom in their lifetimes, yet Nadia and the others recognized the lies and faux freedoms were lies.

 

Men conquer, and I'm The Man.

For instance, how could Russians not see how Pussy Riot was trying to help and liberate them? The state-run media saw to that: A "Punk Prayer" has the lyrics "oh shit, oh shit, oh shit," and due to this and some spin doctoring, most of the surprisingly pious country to this day thinks Pussy Riot members defecated inside the church. Thus their sensibilities were hurt, accused and convicted of a hate crime.

RT helped WikiLeaks

And as ludicrous as it may seem, even RT -- which has done so much to reveal what American media/propaganda tries to conceal -- has been forced to go overtly pro-Moscow in reporting new propaganda. The channel was always funded by the state but exhibited editorial freedom that made it one of our favorite outlets to turn to get a view on what our own government wouldn't tell us. An opposition party, no matter how awful, is always needed in a democracy.

• Datelines, maps - casualties of Russia’s Crimea invasion
• Yes, there are bag guys in the Ukrainian gov't [but never mind that, the U.S. loves friendly dictators]
• AUDIO: Pussy Riot: Words Will Break Cement!