288,000 Jelly Beans, 1 video (Kina Grannis)

(Kina Grannis) Posted Nov. 2, 2011 -- "In Your Arms" took 22 months, 1357 hours, 30 people, 2 ladders, 1 still camera, and 288 thousand jelly beans! It already has well over 2 million hits. Kina is on tour and in Europe in 2012 and on Facebook all the time.She has a new album called Stairwells. "In Your Arms" was written by Kina Grannis, directed by Greg Jardin, produced by Daphne Raves, with concept art by Lauren Gregg, wardrobe by Gillian Zwick, sound design by Suzanne Goldish, using the production company: @radical.media. See the Secret Crazy Project celebration.

The awesome Jelly Bean Animation Team was: Kristina Carucci, Lauren Cunningham, MacKenna Dixon, Marcus Demmon, Kevin Harman, Alexandra Judelsohn, Jay Kim, Pearl Lung, Ptolemy Slocum, Erin Thiele, and Clarisse Wiedem with additional animators: Monica Ahanonu, Matt Beans, Sarah Burt, David Chang, Jane Cohen, John D'Arco, Hope Marquardt, Erin McLaughlin, Krisztianna Ortiz, Kyle Padilla, Allen Marshall Palmer, Natalie Pasallar, JJ Rubin, Cherie Saulter, Susan Wiedem, John Sheptock, Janine Sides, Hethur Suval, Chelsea Stark, and Sarah Tejeda.

Special thanks to Jelly Belly [a gross, allergenic, sweet tasting mix of chemical flavors, colors, sugar, bleached flour, and corn syrup that it better regarded as a pretty "art supply" than any kind of "food"]. Kina Grannis on Myspace or kinagrannis.com

Free Art in Los Angeles today (P.S.T.)

PacificStandardTime.org FREE ADMISSION

WestHollywoodBookFair.org (Oct. 2, 2011)

The Great Wall of Los Angeles (NEWS)

Wisdom Quarterly
(kpfk.org)

Los Angeles versus WAR

LA Vs. WAR will mark the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with a massive group art exhibition and event taking place in Downtown Los Angeles in a multi-media exhibition chronicling the creative responses to the current military conflicts in the Middle East/North Africa/Central Asia, The Global War on Terror, the Drug Wars, and other wars...

In the Land of the Smiling Buddha
One of the most mysterious and most beautiful states of India, Arunachal Pradesh is a paradise for those who love solitude and spiritual bliss. Above, a kingdom of grey, below, a carpet of white and orange poppies. A serpentine road passes by, combing through that carpet. Destination: Naamgye Lhatse, Tawang monastery.

A graffiti idea, Thai Buddhist temple art (Richard Enticknap/fantasma dorido/flickr)

The Buddha in the Attic (novel by Julie Otsuka)
AUDIO: Otsuka's US history tells the story of a group of young women brought over from Japan to San Francisco as “picture brides” nearly a century ago just before Pearl Harbor. They struggle to master a new language and adapt to a new culture raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and history.

Shaolin! Buddha Stars in a Kung-Fu Flick
Sadistic warlords square off against noble monks in “Shaolin,” Benny Chan’s satisfying kung-fu action-and-redemption film starring Andy Lau. If the movie feels old-school (with new-school production values), consider its pedigree. It’s no wonder: “Shaolin” is a reimagining of the 1982 “Shaolin Temple,” in which Jet Li made his debut. Trailer

The Buddha's hometown relics to be displayed in S.L.
Relics (cremation remains such as fragments of the Buddha's bones) will travel to Sri Lanka next January, Indian High Commissioner to Sri Lanka Ashok K. Kantha said here on Saturday. This is the first time in recent history that the relics will travel out of India. All protocol extended to a head of state will be given to the relics.

The Novice: A Story of True Love
A Vietnamese legend is the root of Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh's debut novel. With its gender disguise and message of forgiveness, it may remind readers a bit of Yentl mixed with the Sermon on the Mount [Jewish and Christian themes regularly alluded to by Thay].

The Great Buddhist Stupa at Sarnath, India

Week-long Silent River (Independent) Film Festival

Kashmir politics in disarray and dirtier than Dal Lake
Kashmiris knew about their leaders all along. They knew they played a many-layered game. So when whistleblower website WikiLeaks recently released cables then US ambassador to India David Mulford sent to the US State Dept. in February 2006, the contents did NOT surprise many.

ABC News won't tolerate 9/11 Conspiracy Theories

Indian separatists attacked in Burma (eurasiareview.com)

When a dead language came alive after a century
The first ever international Pali [an exclusively Buddhist language] conference was held in Sri Lanka. It was organized by the Dept. of Pali and Buddhist Studies of the University of Jayawardenapura, a historical event.



Pāḷi: The word Pali itself signifies "line" or "(canonical) text,"a name that seems to have its origins in commentarial traditions, but the line of original text quoted was distinguished from the commentary or vernacular translation that followed it in the manuscript. R.C. Childers translates the word as "series" and states that the language "bears the epithet in consequence of the perfection of its grammatical structure."

NASA hands over ISS research to non-profit CASIS

NASA sets sights on Mars after unmanned Moon shot

China opposes Mexican president's meeting with Dalai lama
BEIJING - China on Saturday expressed strong discontent and opposition to the meeting between Mexican President Felipe Calderon Hinojosa and the Dalai Lama. "This grossly interferes in China's internal affairs, hurts the feelings of the Chinese people, and damages China-Mexico relations," said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ma Zhaoxu in a press release.
China condemns Mexican president’s meeting with Dalai Lama
(BNO NEWS) The Chinese government on Saturday strongly condemned a meeting between Mexican President Felipe Calderón and Tibet's exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, saying it damaged relations between both countries.

Amazing Video Art

(LINK) Art gives life meaning. It unites us, as this peaceful video from violent Israel demonstrates. There just might be hope for us all to live joyfully together. Note the moving picture in their hands.

• FilmWeek: The Debt, Seven Days in Utopia, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life, A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, and more
• Bush talks 2012, Dick Cheney's book (MSNBC)
  
  
• Anti-Israel protest disrupts UK concert series
• PHOTOS: "Apollo 18" and found footage movies

Rebels loot strange treasure of Gadhafis

The Gadhafi family's ostentatious homes filled with expensive cars and clothes shock and anger Libyans. - "Darling" Condie Rice photos found - Rebel steals famous hat - Comedian: Harder to joke

• Libya fighters look for desert showdown with Qaddafi
• Gaddafi, in hiding, vows NO surrender in Libya
• Kaddafi: NATO trying to "occupy" Libya
• Rebels claim Kwadhafi foreign minister caught
• Libya rebels focus on tribal city as Gaddafi haven
• A glance at Moammar Gaddafi's family

Space junk suddenly a big problem

Earth's orbit is now so dirty that officials might have to clean it with unique tech tricks. - New findings on Mars - Shuttles' final wrap - Space station's future

Sold out "Burning Man" begins (watch live)

Madeleine Brand (KPCC)

Nighttime glimpse of Burning Man 2010 (Michael Holden/cc by-nc-nd/Flickr.com)

BLACK ROCK CITY, Nevada - Economic austerity? Not when it comes to entertaining distractions. More than 50,000 people are converging this week at "Burning Man" for the annual arts festival. It reaches its zenith on Labor Day. Among the attractions are a 15 foot tall Pez Dispenser with a giant yellow chicken head and a giant fire breathing dragon that doubles as a Viking ship.

WATCH LIVE

The festival culminates with the torching of an enormous effigy. For the first time in the festival's 25 year history, tickets are sold out. Scalpers on EBay are charging as much as $800 for tickets [for those afraid to show up and get in for free or for much less], causing some to suggest that capitalistic interests are overshadowing this year's communitarian gathering.

Jessica Bruder joins Madeleine Brand from the desert. Bruder is the author of Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man, writing about the gathering's growing pains for the New York Times.

• LISTEN: "Burning Man" begins!

More

• Burning Man (official website)
• Burning Man Buddhists
• Lotus in a Sea of Fire: Burning Buddhist Questions
• While reflecting on Buddhism and Burning Man, I learned of a wildfire encroaching on a meditation retreat. It's an analogy... Of the many things for which San Francisco is notorious, Buddhism and Burning Man are undoubtedly near the top of the list. Home to the first Buddhist temples in the US, the city has attracted several waves of Asian immigrants, a handful of Zen masters, and a bunch of Beat writers that together have fostered dozens of sanghas representing an array of Buddhist traditions (Reality Sandwich).
• Buddhist Hoola Hoop: Burning Man, Markawasi, Peru
• Burning Man Buddha (Tricycle)
• Buddha Camp: Bringing (Nichiren) Buddhism to Burning Man since 2007: They're baaaack for their fifth year on the Playa! Their 2011 address will be the block of 4:30 and Coming Out (approximately). All chanting is done American Gongyo style. BuddhaCamp@theLotusDome is a Burning Man theme camp that was started by a small group of Burner Buddhists in Seattle, Washington.

World's Arts and Religions are All Related

Wisdom Quarterly

Messiah, a great pharoah in a lineage of great rulers,*King Tut (copycateffect blog)

The world's great artistic and cultural (particularly sacred mythological/historical texts) borrowed from one another. From prehistory, to ancient Sumeria, to Egypt, to Vedic India, to Buddhism, to Christianity, to our "Western" eclectic cosmopolitan tastes, the similarities are no coincidence. Ancient astronauts (devas) shared much around throughout the planet -- particularly to mystics and shamans wherever they were residing -- leaving behind pyramids to massive stupas visible from space. The world is interdependent and one.

Maitreya, the Buddha-to-come, from the Tibetan Thiksey monastery in Ladakh, India (allposters.com)

Fjordman Report (Scandinavia) Gatesofvienna
There was...was the heretical Pharaoh Akhenaten in the 14th century BC. The art depicting him and his wife [the great] Nefertiti is quite naturalistic.

It is unlike anything before in Egyptian history and may have been inspired by that of the Minoan culture on the island of Crete -- considered by many to be the first European civilization.

This style is still discernible in objects found in the tomb of Tutankhaten, believed to be son of Akhenaten, who later changed his name to Tutankhamun [King Tut] as the old religion was reestablished.

Even though the artistic legacy of Akhenaten was quickly forgotten, his religious ideas may have proven far more durable. His insistence on worshiping one supreme god, Aten, makes him a pioneer in monotheism. It has been speculated, though disputed by many scholars, that Akhenaten’s ideas may have inspired those of Moses, which led to the creation of Judaism and, by extension, Christianity.

King Tut's Lineage Revealed (witola.com)

The earliest alphabet, the ancestor of nearly every alphabet used around the globe, including -- via Phoenician -- the Greek and the Latin [Indo-European, rooted in Sanskrit] ones, was partly derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs representing syllables.

Greek artists studied and imitated Egyptian art but experimented and decided to look for themselves instead of following any traditional, ready-made formula.

As Gombrich says, “The Greeks began to use their eyes. Once this revolution had begun, there was no stopping it.” It is surely no coincidence that this Great Awakening of art to freedom took place in the hundred years between, roughly 520 and 420 BC, in Greek city-states such as Athens, where philosopher Socrates challenged our ideas about the world:

“It was here, above all, that the greatest and most astonishing revolution in the whole history of art bore fruit.... The great revolution of Greek art, the discovery of natural forms and of foreshortening, happened at the time which is altogether the most amazing period of human history.”

This art was later spread far beyond the borders of Greece, when Alexander the Great created his empire and brought Hellenistic art to Asia:

“Even in far-distant India, the Roman way of telling a story and of glorifying a hero was adopted by artists who set themselves the task of illustrating the story of a peaceful conquest, the story of the Buddha. The art of sculpture had flourished in India long before the Hellenistic influence reached the country; but it was in the frontier region of Gandhara that the figure of Buddha was first shown in the reliefs which became the model for later Buddhist art.... Greek and Roman art, which had taught men to visualize gods and heroes in beautiful form, also helped the Indians to create an image of their saviour. The beautiful head of the Buddha, with its expression of deep repose, was also made in this frontier region of Gandhara.”


Buddhism spread from India to the rest of Asia and brought with it these influences from Western art. This is highly significant if we remember that the invention of block printing during the Tang dynasty in China was intimately linked to Buddhist monasteries and Buddhist art.

Alexander the Great may also have brought with him inked seals to India during his invasion, and Indian merchants later introduced them to the Chinese. Stamped figures of the Buddha marked the transition from seal impression to woodcut in China.

The oldest surviving printed texts from East Asia are Buddhist scriptures. Printing was thus used to promulgate a specific religion, just like Gutenberg’s printing press in Europe was later used to print Bibles.

The Islamic Middle East, however, for centuries rejected both the Eastern and the Western printing traditions due to religious intolerance and hostility towards pictorial arts. And they suffered all the more for it. More

• *We are suggesting that the reason St. Issa (Isa, Y'shua, Joshua, Jesus Christ) seems to have come out of nowhere to dominate world headlines is not only because early Christianity and subsequent Catholicism borrowed from the best of all the world's spiritual traditions, particularly Buddhism with Jesus learning Buddhism at Hemis Gompa, a Buddhist monastery in the Indian Himalayas), but because the pharoahs also believed in rebirth and returned to rule their people like Dalai Lama incarnations. The many gospels of the Judeo-Christian Bible said so before it was edited out at various councils that particularly excised the African (Egyptian and Ethiopian) connection and what are now known as the enlightening Gnostic Gospels of the Essenes and the libraries of Nag Hamadi and Qumran that paint a much more complete picture of his life and explain the roots of the monasticism he brought to Jews.
  

• Was Jesus a Pharoah?
• "Jesus: Last of the Pharoahs" (Ralph Ellis)
• "Jesus in the House of the Pharoahs"
  
• Historic Connection of Jesus and Moses with Pharaohs Ankhnaten and Thoth Moses III
  

Coachella is no Woodstock (video)

Wisdom Quarterly (REPORTING) WARNING: F-word. Cee Lo Green and his all-girl band CUT SHORT at Coachella 2011

The camera adds 90 percent of the excitement to Warpaint on a hot afternoon.

What can't be seen is the heat and a palpable sense of disinterest (with boredom creeping in). For example, notice the chinks in the armor: At minute 2:40, people are walking by without looking, cars are passing, big swaths of empty lawn lay barren, and massive numbers of yellow-shirted security dudes staring at hipsters have nothing to do but sip on solar-irradiated plastic water bottles full of xenoestrogens. Love you all! Wish you were here! Yawn.

No peace, no love, and very little rock 'n roll, it's all about looking for DJs in humid circus tents to get out of the sun. It gets better at night, but only if we have been sleeping all day.

Flogging Molly "Seven Deadly Sins," live at Coachella 2011

Fun is what we make of it: friends, good company, finding in the right tents, getting good phone reception, and keeping laptop batteries from overheating in the desert while trying to recharge them using a photovoltaic device hanging off a backpack. Dehydration makes one dizzy.

But the shocking thing is how well behaved everyone is. Woodstock was all about gate crashing and being so wet and muddy in the middle of August that nothing mattered. Of course, in those days, there was a war going on. Now we have three wars (not counting the secret ones). Coachella security won't let anyone within a mile of the gate without a wristband. We were born too late. We miss the myth of the 60s. Who even played Woodstock 1969?.

Techno, the real reason people drive out to Coachella