loveitallabove

Into The Void | The New Republic this old article popped into my Google Alert...bookmarking here for later!

NYC Dept of Sanitation ID , originally uploaded by levenj . There are some things that never found a home in an album or garbage bin over the years. Flickr's the stream of them in my life now. Odd to think they're then the property of Microsoft, right?

toogoodtobe , originally uploaded by levenj . ...loaded some old drawings on to flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesgleventhal/sets/72157622990368798/with/4180462375/ , before pads when into boxes.

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...

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...

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 , 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

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.

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 unit...

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 S...

The New Children's Museum, San Deigo ROCKS! Ernest Silva, The Rain House, 1994/2008 The Rain House As a long-standing component of NCM’s programming, and a carryover from the Museum’s previous facility, Silva’s Rain House, is both playhouse and home to projects key to NCM’s bi-national programming. For Animal Art, Silva has created new foam puzzle-piece furniture to augment the way young children love to play house in The Rain House’s soothing interior. And, in the “back yard” Silva has created a new interactive felt mural. Children are invited to create their own flying creatures and use Silva’s templates to add birds to his avian menagerie that flies freely blithely ignoring the physical and political ramifications of our border region.

With Magnes as an institutional lender, I went to the opening of As It Is Written: Project 304,805 at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, or the "CJM," a somewhat new museum on the SF cityscape designed by Daniel Liebeskind . For me and my host, after grabbing a bite at 'wichcraft , the evening started at Bloomingdales, and it's astounding how much the retail space of the Westfield Mall related to the lines of sight and kinda of empty signifiers in Liebeskind's architecture. And, in fact, I think Liebeskind is quite purposeful to this end, reaching for a lingua franca of the spaces we share in -- malls and museums. I cannot get out of my mind the clips from Warhol where he would talk about how wonderful the synergies between shopping malls and museums were. "I just love it," I think he said in some T.V. clip I saw once. I wish I could find the video. And that kind of Warholian euphoria informed the evening as well. Below is the description of this ...

How great is this?!...

The Nick Cave show at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts was a real sleeper/hit... this vid of a buncha guys strolling what looked like Central Park in whacked out African suits was just TOO MUCH!

June 2009

So far we have seen Ice Age 3D and last night it was Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs . This pix's from earlier this summer and Ice Age 3D viewing.

Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic Saturday, April 25, 2009 Dennis Gallagher , a San Francisco sculptor known for his work in ceramic media, died Monday after an extended hospital stay. He was 57. The day that he died was his birthday. A poignant tribute compiled by his wife just opened at the Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco last month.

September 18, 2009 David Silver , Assistant Professor: Media Studies & Davies Professor, University of San Francisco with Francesco as host and Albert Stankowski , Virtual Shtetl , Museum of the History of Polish Jews and his interpreter from the State Department Marek.

Sometimes it really seems like Allan Kaprow may have been the Alpha and the Omega... QUEENS MUSEUM OF ART Josiah McElheny: Yard (Junkyard), 1961/2009 On view through October 04, 2009 YARD, 1961 ALLAN KAPROW Yard (Junkyard) is a ten-day event at the Queens Museum of Art, an attempt at re-inventing the ethos of Allan Kaprow’s Yard, in particular the first variant of the work, from 1961.

By Steven Rosenberg Globe Staff / September 20, 2009 ...As Jews north of Boston prepare to celebrate the second day of their new year, Rosh Hashana, many are thinking about how the local Jewish community will survive in light of a recently released independent report that calls for sweeping changes in area synagogues, community centers, camps, and the largest Jewish charity north of Boston. In perhaps the hottest button in the report, prepared by the Jewish Communi ty Task Force, comprising Harvard Business School professor Carl Sloane and four Harvard researchers, it recommends that five Conservative synagogues - in Swampscott, Marblehead, Salem, Peabody, and Beverly - consider merging into two temples... To read more click here . Aquaerobics at the Jewish Community Center of the North Shore in Marblehead, which has lost 20 percent of its members in the past year. (Michele Mcdonald for The Boston Globe)

The day started with a visit to Jewelle Gomez with Nomi Talisman . And ended watching Mark Hosler of Negativland at UC Berkeley as part of Ken Goldberg 's Berkeley Center for New Media .

http://ahtgroup.com/services/social-media-strategies LOL. I'm a human being.

“...The picture was thinly painted and never intended to be finished,” said Mr. Christiansen, who says he believes it was actually a study. “It was a sitting done from life, which gives it great immediacy. The figure of the man is more finished than the costume or the background.” The figure’s face, tired eyes and nose bear an eerie resemblance to the man looking out at the viewer from the far right of Velázquez’s “Surrender of Breda” (1634-35), which he painted to commemorate the Spanish victory over the Dutch. That painting, which is in the Prado Museum in Madrid, dates from around the same time as “Portrait of a Man,” made when Velázquez was 35. But at this point nobody knows for sure if the figure in “The Surrender of Breda” or the man in the Met’s canvas is the artist himself. Other depictions of Velázquez, in “La Meninas” at the Prado, for instance, were painted when he was 57. “Why not be a self-portrait?” Mr. Christiansen said. “It might be fun to put it on a blog on the museum...

Michael Wesch

... Nina -- Late in the book, you introduce Crawford and Mathew’s value matrix of five essential consumer values: access, experience, price, service, and product. You note that their research showed that the most successful businesses seek to dominate in only one area, be distinguished in another, and acceptable in the final three. Museums are very used to trying to be all things to all people. How do you recommend institutions prioritizing their focus? John: I was quite taken by Crawford and Mathew’s notion that to try to be excellent at everything is a recipe for bankruptcy... Read more here!

Fred Isaac gave a reading at Afikomen on my birthday from Jews of Oakland and Berkeley through Arcadia Publishing , a project I helped him get started on. A lot of the pictures come from the Magnes archives, and Magnes itself as a catalytic, Jewish cultural organization also plays a central role, with all credit to Rebecca and Seymour Fromer .

TWO CAKES!