Japanese Fart Scrolls

Check out this site, if you dare!

...something a bit…unusual. It was an old Japanese scroll about farting. The whole scroll, which is called He-Gassen (“The Fart Battle”) is just about people farting. Farting at other people, farting at cats, farting off of horses, farting into bags; just farting everywhere.

I love Japanese culture!

Zen and the Art of Landscape

I find this picture to be particularly beautiful and restful. It was done by Herb Arnold for the Zen Center of San Francisco. Enjoy!

Zen and the Art of Landscape

The magic of Chinese sumi-e landscape painting...

I've put pictures of Zen landscapes here, but little in the way of the artist's rendition of landscape. Here's one in motion, creating an evocative scene with a few sure brushstrokes in ink. Magic!

My Work

Just a couple of my paintings...

Zen and the Art of Landscape

I found a great site put up by Bowduin College about the Zen gardens of Kyoto, Japan. Kyoto was not attacked during WWII, and is known for its original architecture, particularly the Buddhist temples and monasteries.

   The web site is dedicated to the gardens of Japan, and primarily to the historic gardens of Kyoto and its environs, including Nara...Although many of these gardens are located within Zen Buddhist monasteries, this site is not intended to explore the influence of Zen thought on Japanese garden design, an influence that is often a matter of conjecture rather than historical evidence. Instead, the site is designed simply to provide the visitor with an opportunity to visit each garden, to move through or around it, to experience it through the medium of high-quality color images, and to learn something of its history.

Zen and the Poetry of Landscape

 

“To what shall

I liken the world?

Moonlight, reflected

In dewdrops,

Shaken from a crane’s bill.”  

Dogen

Let There Be Light!

Beautiful Magnum photos of illumination at Slate.  (Above, followers of the Dalai Lama await his visit in Taiwan.)

Keep Calm...

"Keep Calm And Carry On" was one of three similar posters produced in 1939, but the first two were so unpopular that Keep Calm never made it into circulation. Maria Bustillos tells the story of its recent rise to fame: in 2000, Stuart Manley, the owner of Barter Books in Northumberland, found a folded poster at the bottom of a box of books he had purchased at auction. (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Zen and the Art of Landscape

The Art of Steve Walker

Recruitment?

A collection of suggestive recruitment posters from the past. Sure, they weren't consciously gay, but they certainly contain a real undertone that I'm sure was picked up by gays at the time. I'm reminded of E.M. Forster's discussion of this topic, where gays have a secret understanding of the world - both the surface and the hidden, gay sensibility.  Check it out.

Cartoon of the Day

Pain and suffering, a graphic representation indeed. I found this attached to a discussion of pain at the Wisdom Quarterly website. Interesting in its relations to Dukka, or the First Noble Truth.

Tibetan Buddhist Mandalas

Over at Huffpost, a great slideshow of Tibetan Buddhist mandalas shows the variations of these beautiful and transient works of religious art.

HuffPost blogger Matteo Pistono explains:

Central to the bestowing of the Kalachakra initiation is the creation of a mandala. "Mandala" literally means "center and circumference" and in the tantric context connotes a circular diagram symbolizing a universe with a deity in the center of his or her palace complete with entourage, gatekeepers, and a surrounding environment. Mandalas are painted on cloth and temple walls, created from colored sand, or fashioned from wood, stone or colored threads.

Here Be Monsters

Over at Slate.com, they have an interesting slideshow of ancient maps that filled in the unknown areas with all sorts of fantastic imaginings. Worth a look...

"The weird bestiary at the edges of maps was in large part an artistic decision, a chance for cartographers to fill in ugly white spaces of the still-unexplored Earth and to stretch their creative wings. (Engraving awesome, foam-spouting behemoths must have been a nice break from tracing the coast of Mexico for the umpteenth time.) But they also served as a reminder of the very real dangers faced by the explorers of the day. No one knew what was out there, and many who left didn't come back."

Hot Man of the Day

An amazing tattoo...

Steve Walker Art (again)

Zen Poetry

The school of Aryadeva is so hard to analyze.
Snow piled up in a silver bowl.
Who could have said it better than that?
The same wind blows across earth,
Mountains, rivers;
It leaves all human and heavenly
Realms refreshed, pure.

- Daito (1282-1334)

Hot Man of the Day

Drainspotting: Manhole Covers as Art

I came upon this site reviewing the book Drainspotting, about the Japanese using their manhole covers as a "canvas" to place artwork. These usually mundane and unnoticeable objects become magically beautiful adornments to the urban landscape. This is one of the things I love about Japanese culture: everything becomes a work of art, even the act of daily living. In this, I find the influence of Zen - where intense viewing and mindfulness reveals the shining beauty in the world about them. Thus, we can have something as mundane and obscure as making and serving tea - cha no yu  - become a work of art and opportunity for meditation and enlightenment. Although these covers don't rise to that level, they present an opportunity for the casual passerby to be surprised into a heightened level of awareness. I wish we could emulate them here in the states.

Steve Walker Art (again)

I came across this brief article about Steve Walker's art which is worth a read. Money quote:

"But Walker's paintings are not about gay people or homosexuality. He describes his art as being about love, hate, pain, joy, touch, communication, beauty, loneliness, attraction, hope, despair, life and death. His art includes universal themes regardless of race, gender, socio-economic class, culture or sexual orientation. However, his work is unique because he conveys these themes through the subjects in his paintings, young gay men. "Remove the gender of the painting's subjects and what we have is human relationships in general, and one's relationship to the world itself," he said. "As a homosexual I have been moved, educated, and inspired by works that deal with a heterosexual context. Why would I assume that a heterosexual would be incapable of appreciating work that speaks to common themes in life, as seen through my eyes as a gay man. If the heterosexual population is unable to do this, then the loss is theirs, not mine."