loveitallabove

"The Ghost Dance was a technology. Literally, a technology is a systematic practice or knowledge of an art, and though we almost always apply the term to the scientific and mechanical, there is no reason not to apply it to other human-made techniques for producing desired results. Maybe the best definition would be: a technology is a practice or technique, or a device for altering the world or the experience of the world. To propose annihilating the inexorable march of history and the irreversibility of death was to propose a technology as ambitious as a moonwalk or a gene splice." - River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West Rebecca Solnit p. 114

So I was at Disneyland, staying at the Doubletree in Anaheim , and I read USA Today. What can I do?... Realism and optimism are recession 'musts' Plain Talk By Al Neuharth, USA TODAY Founder You're getting all kinds of advice on how to survive this recession. Some is sound. Some is silly. It's been my good fortune to have lived through 15 recessions and one depression in my 84 years. Based on those experiences, I suggest you not only will survive but ultimately thrive if you practice the proper mix of these two recession "musts": • Realism. • Optimism. Reality is that we've been in a recession since last December, even though it took the National Bureau of Economic Research a year to figure it out. That reality means that if you haven't already done so, you should tighten your belt as much as necessary. Optimism means you must understand that if you handle this problem properly, you can ride high on the wave of recovery and prosperity that follows eve...

Blockbuster Openings, Lackluster Box Office By Michael Cieply "What a year for movie openings. I mean, who could forget 'Twilight'? Teenagers screaming for free tickets outside the dual-theater Westwood premiere here. Mayhem in the malls. Girls thirsting for Robert Pattinson. Box-office projections growing bigger and bigger as online vendors sold out theater after theater. It was amazing. When all is said and done, maybe 24 million tickets will be sold to that movie, based on current sales. That makes it almost as big as, what? 'Patch Adams,' the No. 10 movie of 1998. Or roughly the size of 'George of the Jungle,' which placed No. 13 the year before." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "Looking back, in fact, 2008 may be remembered as the year when Hollywood succeeded in redefining the Big Event." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "It’s all great fun — and, in the heat of the moment, can seem tantalizingly real. Remember the high-heeled stampede to...

Everyone wants to write a book. And now everyone can. This seems sort of true, though who and what “everyone” means is certainly relative. There are pirates off Somalia and desperate poverty in every region of the globe. But indeed everyone means a lot more of everyone than it did one hundred years ago, even fifty. It's FFFin' beautiful. Look at me write here. It ain't no book, but it sure is published. But on the other hand the printed book industry's crapped out. A good friend who just had a really successful run on a new book says her publisher could care less about the writer. And according to recent OpEd in The New York Times by Timothy Egan : I know: publishers say they print garbage so that real literature, which seldom makes any money, can find its way into print. True, to a point. But some of them print garbage so they can buy more garbage. My mind is still processing the time I spent reading Chris Anderson’s Long Tail, The, Revised and Updated Edition: W...

interesting piece re:twitter and friend feed . Inneresting because metrics, value systems and honest assesment of the new life that is on-line. looking forward. james P.S. is it true that twitter won't update my facebook status any longer? is it a feud? or am I just being punished?

From The Chronicle: Year-End Giving Update Charities have chalked up mixed results as they seek donations in the final weeks of the year, reports The Chronicle of Philanthropy . Thirty-seven of the 66 charities The Chronicle contacted said that contributions had dropped this year. The remaining 29 said contributions were flat or had risen. Even organizations that have received big increases are worried, however, because they say demand is increasing fast and they are facing cuts in government aid. The Chronicle will continue to report on year-end results in the coming days; feel free to send your results to editor@philanthropy.com.

We went to Disneyland this weekend. It was the trip of a lifetime. I hope there will be others -- trips of a lifetime and Disney excursions -- and I hope this one stays up there amongst both lists. Coming down, Poppop drove the whole way and there was SNOW in what’s known as the “grapevine.” So we did not go the inland route, but followed down the 101 toward Los Angeles. We did not see the snow, but we’d see it on the way back. Altogether, including a Mickey D’s stop and some sushi well outside L.A. – maybe even before Oxnard -- it was fourteen hours. For me Oxnard was made famous by Ill Repute as the "Land of No Toilets." They had a ”gold vinyl” release of their record “What Happens Next/Oxnard - Land Of No Toilets.” We drove through Oxnard, needed a toilet and found no useful exits. I'm not sure if that’s what Ill Repute meant. But it sure felt true on this trip. Big driving in California is still so weird for me, because I do not know California and it is ...

MILK so effectively stays on-story: Harvey Milk awakens at forty; moves to San Francisco with his new lover Scott; Milk helps develop the Castro as a gay Mecca; runs and runs for office until redistricting turns in his favor and he joins the City’s Board of Supervisors; as the first openly gay elected official in the United States Harvey Milk permanently and irrevocably affects positive change in the American psyche; lastly, he is shot down by a jilted co-worker, shot violently, tragically tumbling down with a banner advertising Tosca at the Opera in clear view. All of this is historical fact (don’t know about the Tosca banner; though if the real-life friends and community leaders who helped to develop the film chose this fictitious embellishment, more power to them…). So I am not ruining anything, and in fact one of the film’s strengths is that, like some other great works of art , it starts from the end. Diane Feinstein’s announcement of the assassination kicks off the film. Penn ...

The closing scene of the film is an elegiac march of candle bearers by the tens of thousands down Market Street – artful harbingers, mournful bellwethers. I remember that image, as a child, on the national news…a strange media silence, before the ridiculousness of the “Twinkie defense” took hold. MILK mentions the “Twinkie defense,” only as a footnote and right before the credits roll. The movie forced my psychic recall of the march and forced away any possible familiarity with Twinkies, junk food junkies , or the eerie old hit penned by Larry Groce that got a lot of play around the same time as Rick Dees' Disco Duck . Meaninglessness. It’s odd and amazing to consider how much the world was upside down when Harvey Milk was being as serious as he could be, as serious as humanly possible. He said then, “My name is Harvey Milk and I’m here to recruit you.”

I saw MILK two weeks ago. I knew MILK would be one of the few movies I saw in 2008. As the father of a two-and-a-half year old boy, my wife and I do not get out to the movies much. When the movie’s forthcoming started a buzz around the S.F. Bay Area, with Sean Penn (a Bay Area celeb) playing the once San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk, I knew this one was necessary. And because of Milk himself. MILK. It's important for now and future generations. I was a kid when he was shot. As someone from the east coast, I knew more about the “Twinkie defense” than Harvey Milk himself, somewhat and until now. Sean Penn’s MILK was equally as much a compliment to Penn’s skills as an actor as the characterization was a testament to the fullness of being that Harvey Milk embodied. You got the sense there was enough Milk for Penn to climb up into and populate. In the film, there could have been more about Milk’s philosophy, more about his love life or more about his abasement or spirit...

This Ron Nagle /Don Ed Hardy show at Rena Bransten Gallery is the bomb! This is one of those once-in-a-lifetime things - a mass conflagration of thoughts, adventure & commodity crammed into a small gallery in downtown San Francisco for a brief period of time. It takes you from the distribution of "china," Empire, tattooing and the body-politic politics of body, to pop & funk and the flac·cid·i·ty of late twentieth-century; post-nuclear aesthetics, back around through high-fire ceramics to the commercial distribution of amalgamated mass culture through the recent success of Don Ed Hardy in every Macy's and Nordstrom's in America. It's quiet. But if you can hear the noise, this show's the bomb. And the old guys sit around in the gallery by way of the power of video and say piss and sh*t and f@ck and everything. Jesse Hamlin wrote a nice brief intro in the Chron's Date Lines: News from the Bay Area arts scene : Ron Nagle and Don Hardy have been ch...

In an article showcasing fans at the AC/DC show at the Oracle Arena on 12/4, SFWeekly called out Karen's coworker for whom I did her Angus poster . Caption reads: "One fan shows us a poster made by a Berkeley artist." Comment (1) reads: "Christopher…Great pic of me and my prized Angus painting. Thank you! Artist credit goes to James Leventhal. But all the credit goes to Angus last night for a front row experience of a lifetime! Cheers, Kelly" Comment by Kelly K. from San Rafael on Dec 5th, 2008, 18:10 pm

MAGNES & artist Jonathon Keats bring together a panel of scholars for a disputation, a " synod ". All this as part of the MAGNES project www.magnes.org/atheon Very successful. Panelists included: Dr. Robert A. Burton, neurologist and author of, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not (2008) Professor John Campbell, Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley and author of Past, Space and Self (1994) and Reference and Consciousness (2002) Dr. Ilan Roth, Senior Physicist, Space Sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley, and Co-Investigator on the Cluster satellites Alla Efimova, Ph.D, Acting Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Magnes