Magnes Goes to U.C. Berkeley

Magnes Collection to U.C. Berkeley | j. the Jewish news weekly of Northern California

After decades as an independent Berkeley institution, the Judah L. Magnes Museum is currently negotiating with U.C. Berkeley to donate its entire collection to the university some time next year.

Many details about the future of Magnes’ finances, board of trustees, staff and location remain undetermined.

What is certain, however, is that a long-planned move from the Magnes’ stately home on Russell Street in the Elmwood District to a new location in the heart of Berkeley has been scrapped, as Magnes has sold the downtown property at 2222 Harold Way.

The negotiations with U.C. Berkeley coincide with Magnes chief curator, Alla Efimova, being named the museum’s new director. Efimova said the pending U.C. Berkeley deal should prove to be a net plus for the Magnes.

In an interview with j., Efimova said the move would make the collections “accessible to a much broader community of scholars worldwide.”

Magnes board president Frances Dinkelspiel expects the changes to benefit both institutions. “This was more a question of what was in the best interest of the Magnes in the long term,” she said. “We thought having a partnership with U.C. Berkeley was the best way to have the Magnes continue for the next 50 to 100 years.”

Negotiations between the Magnes and U.C. Berkeley are expected to wrap up by year’s end.

To read more click here.

That's Entertainment

A police car
and a screaming siren -
A pneumatic drill and ripped up concrete -
A baby wailing and stray dog howling -
The screech of brakes and lamp light blinking -

That's Entertainment.

A smash of glass and a rumble of boots -
An electric train and a ripped up 'phone booth -
Paint splattered walls and the cry of a tomcat -
Lights going out and a kick in the balls -

That's Entertainment.

Days of speed and slow time Mondays -
Pissing down with rain on a boring Wednesday -
Watching the news and not eating your tea -
A freezing cold flat and damp on the walls -

That's Entertainment.

Waking up at 6 a.m. on a cool warm morning -
Opening the windows and breathing in petrol -
An amateur band rehearsing in a nearby yard -
Watching the tele and thinking about your holidays -

That's Entertainment.

Waking up from bad dreams and smoking cigarettes -
Cuddling a warm girl and smelling stale perfume -
A hot summer's day and sticky black tarmac -
Fedding ducks in the park and wishing you were far away -

That's Entertainment.

Two lovers kissing amongst the scream of midnight -
Two lovers missing the tranquility of solitude -
Getting a cab and travelling on buses -
Reading the graffiti about slashed seat affairs -

That's Entertainment.

Glenn Somnab!tch ?

Photo_110809_001, originally uploaded by levenj.

Is this guy really dressed as a Nazi? Can this be real?! Is it actually in my Barnes & Nobles??

Innovation #wma09

Innovation #wma09, originally uploaded by levenj.

Lori Fogarty, Director, Oakland Museum of California; Douglas Fogle, Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs at the Hammer; Ted Russell, Senior Program Officer for the Arts, James Irvine Foundation; and Angelina Russo, Associate Professor, Faculty of Design, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

Somehow I Felt A Lot of Upside Here for America's Future

Two articles in my Sunday New York Times made me feel very postive about America's future for some reason. And so I wanted to paste them here for exploration later.

Harry MacAvoy lauds the merits of having been born specifically in 1957 here.

And RoseLee Godlberg who I studied with briefly at NYU "When asked her age, Ms. Goldberg said:

'I’m old enough to have gone to my first Bienniale and Documenta in 1972 and to have a 28-year-old daughter.')" Adding about the creation of PERFORMA: “I really wanted New York to have that feeling again,” she said. “The sense that creative people own the city, and that everything is possible.”

makes you feel like anything's possible and us Gen Xers, the DIYers ain't even where they're at yet...nice to be 40.

His new show at the National Museum of the American Indian, called "Brian Jungen: Strange Comfort"

Brian Jungen, Prototype for New Understanding #1, 1998. Image: curatedobject.us

I remember seeing Brian Jungen work in Canada when Karen and I were in Montreal many years ago, and was TOTALLY taken by it, like a totem, right? I mean all he need do is make one and have that one magick item have a lingering, magical, even transformative effect.

To view some elegant pix in a gallery by the Washington Post, click here. Gopnik writes on DC show here:

When Jungen made "People's Flag," a huge scarlet banner sewn together from red clothing, red umbrella skins and other mass-produced red textiles, it was to show at the Tate in 2006. The piece paid homage to the long history of popular protest and to England's left. "It seemed awkward for me to make some sort of statement about the native condition in London," Jungen recalls.

But as it hangs in his show at the NMAI, Jungen has discovered that "People's Flag" is being interpreted as the flag of a united Red Nation of Indian peoples -- a concept that doesn't really exist in Canada, he says, where native groups tend to retain their separate identities. (Here in the United States, we've got such things as Rednation.net, a Web site for Indian issues, and the Red Nation Film Festival in Los Angeles.)

And there's a great dialogue on this blog here, View on Canadian Art, check the comment space:

as a member of the peanut gallery, I think one can and should reconsider Jungen’s work, especially the more recent pieces. Some of it is amazingly terrible. The golf bag totem pole’s demonstrate how the “critique” is back-firing into exactly this bad faith “party-line” that Gopnik sees as problematic to the critic’s missteps. These more recent works are totally formulaic, predictable and devoid of any nuance which could be found in the Prototypes for a new understanding and lawn furniture whale skeleton pieces.

I would like to be surprised and stimulated by him again, but it feels to me like the current work is more about the symptom of a vampiric art market.

Another One of These -- "I KNOW These People?!..." Moments

Using Natural Language Processing and Social Network Analysis to study ancient Babylonian society

By Patrick Schmitz, IST–Data Services

March 10, 2009

In Near Eastern Studies, as in other areas of Humanities, researchers often study corpora of administrative and legal texts to understand economic, administrative, and societal structure, considering the activities of individuals and their interactions with each other. This is often painstaking work, as, for example, in studying ancient Babylonian texts where scholars must first be able to read Akkadian, and then must assemble all the references to people and activities by hand. This process is formally known as prosopography, and is used by many scholars across a range of Humanities research. Now, Professor Niek Veldhuis and Dr. Laurie Pearce are working with IST–Data Services' Patrick Schmitz to apply some more modern approaches to the problem. They are applying techniques from the fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Social Network Analysis (SNA) to extract the names and basic familial relationships of people mentioned in texts, and then to assemble the social network of the people based upon the activities described....

I had a meeting with Patrick a couple of weeks ago and Dr. Laurie Pearce told me about this project as it was developing a while ago. It's an amazing concept. You gotta read more and to read more click here.