Flying Cow

Gong Fu December 10, 2010

: “Many people have a misconception that martial arts is about fighting and killing,” the monk was quoted as saying, “It is actually about improving your wisdom and intelligence.”

As many scholars have pointed out, the predominant orientation of traditional Chinese philosophy is the concern about how to live one’s life, rather than finding out the truth about reality.

was he Zhuangzi who had dreamt of being a butterfly or was he a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi?

views about human nature are more recommendations of how one should view oneself in order to become a better person than metaphysical assertions about whether humans are by nature good or bad.

Art is not ultimately measured by its dominance of the market. In addition, the function of art is not accurate reflection of the real world; its expression is not constrained to the form of universal principles and logical reasoning, and it requires cultivation of the artist, embodiment of virtues/virtuosities, and imagination and creativity. If philosophy is “a way of life,” as Pierre Hadot puts it, the kung fu approach suggests that we take philosophy as the pursuit of the art of living well, and not just as a narrowly defined rational way of life.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/kung-fu-for-philosophers/?src=me&ref=general

Salah satu Interpretasi December 10, 2010

Photography critic and curator Carol Squiers has been studying the ways in which the news photograph transmits political and cultural messages. By analyzing photographs that she isolated from the text of The New York Times over a four-month period, she found that-despite the seemingly objective character of the predominantly banal style of photograph used-the frequency of certain types of images conveyed a consistent world view. In general, the photographs presented cultural stereotypes: Men were most often shown as competent and in positions of world power, whereas women were pictured much less often and usually in subordinate roles. (From a press release for the exhibition In and Out of Power, P.S. 1, NY, ’81). She also determined that the way in which text and photograph are currently linked in photo journalism was first defined by Life magazine. Like The New York Times, Life deliberately chose fairly undistinguished photographs to illustrate stories, ones that could be easily colored by words. Photographs that were too expressive, such as those by Walker Evans or Andre Kertesz, were reserved for a special section entitled, "Photographic Essay." (Squiers, "Looking at Life," Artforum, Dec. ’81).

Hidden biases in the media are revealed through various strategies, such as creating visual narratives through selected sequences of photographs; arranging the material into subject categories to uncover the media’s perspective on what constitutes the news; and altering the meaning of an image by the choice of caption.

Mandel and Sultan’s interest in the media goes back to 1973, the year they collaborated on the first of many billboards. They were attracted to the billboard as an artistic vehicle, because they wanted to reach a much larger and more varied public than would ever find its way into an art institution.

Our society is exposed to countless images every day, most of them designed to sell products. The image, and the verbal messages paired with them, are so common that many people are unaware of the power they exert over our lives.

The text of the mass media image, as the late French philosopher Roland Barthes explained in his essay, "The Photographic Message," (Image, Music, Text, NY: Hill & Wag, ’77) functions on both the level of denotation (identification) and that of connotation (the communication of certain cultural ideas through textures, colors, selection, etc.).

He recognized that just as language structure is based on a system of signs or symbols, so is a visual image. (darn, that incident is so embarrassing -red)
A photograph is a complex of signs that can be analyzed scientifically-Barthes called this method of sign analysis semiology.

he artists extracted these photographs from the everyday world and gave them new meanings through placement in a different context, in a way similar to Marcel Duchamp’s creation of "ready-mades." Evidence is structured in the photo-narrative style of such books as Robert Frank’s The Americans; there is a subtle order to the progression of images. Sultan said that, by recording existing information, he and Mandel were making "…poetry based on (the institutions’) facts."

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/12/larry-sultan-mike-mandel-matrix.html