loveitallabove

ch-ch-ch- check it .

The Daly City History Museum Opens March 15 The History Guild of Daly City/Colma will have the Grand Opening of its new "full size" history museum on Sunday, March 15, 2009 at 2:00 pm. The new museum is located at 6351 Mission St. in the original John Daly Library building at "The Top of the Hill". The hours of the musem will be Tuesdays from 12:00pm to 3:00pm and the first Saturday of the month from 12:00pm to 3:00pm. Admission will be free. Guild members will serve as greeters and hosts. The museum will have expanded displays that afford an overview of local history from 1859 to the present. Special seasonal and commemorative exhibits will be featured. They did it...I was there. BIG congratulations to Mark S. Weinberger, President -- pictured below, preparing for the ribbon cutting on the Ken & Bunny Gillespie Room. Well done, Mark!

Last Friday I had a great MAGNES day. I went to go meet with Mike Linksvayer at Creative Commons with Perian Sully and Francesco Spagnolo , with whom I work at MAGNES. The office was cool and very low key, on Second Street in a building that felt like an old converted loft office in SoHo. So much about the meeting made me feel like a kid again, making my way in NYC in my twenties. Francesco showcased some of what he had developed for delivery through flickr and other applications, namely the Jewish Digital Narratives . Mike dug what we were doing and encouraged MAGNES to connect with Fred Benenson and others with Creative Commons, maybe even to be part of a Creative Commons Salon in S.F. Schuh-weeeeet. Dig it -- Benenson helped to found http://freeculture.org/ . I blogged about that sh^t an' MAGNES a looooong time ago. Last October even...o.k., not that long ago. From Creative Commons we drove on to the Presidio to join the Internet Archive Friday lunch. Perian helpe...

Italy dig unearths female 'vampire' in Venice By Ariel David, Associated Press ROME — An archaeological dig near Venice has unearthed the 16th-century remains of a woman with a brick stuck between her jaws — evidence, experts say, that she was believed to be a vampire. The unusual burial is thought to be the result of an ancient vampire-slaying ritual. It suggests the legend of the mythical bloodsucking creatures was tied to medieval ignorance of how diseases spread and what happens to bodies after death, experts said. The well-preserved skeleton was found in 2006 on the Lazzaretto Nuovo island, north of the lagoon city, amid other corpses buried in a mass grave during an epidemic of plague that hit Venice in 1576. The cool article above ran in my Oakland Tribune with the pic of the poor lady with the brick in her mouth. Then there was a review of the Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese exhibition at the MFA Boston in another paper. Contemporaneity. TINTORETTO (b. 1518, Venezia, d. 1...

Last Saturday Karen, Li’l E and I went to the de Young to see the Warhol Live . We’d just been a couple of weeks ago to see the Warhol Prints down in San Jose . Recently there was an exhibition of Warhol’s Jews at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. That one seemed to miss the mark, according to the San Francisco Chronicle's Ken Baker : The exhibition title "Warhol's Jews" grates on my ears by its proprietary ring. Granted the title derives from an ensemble of Andy Warhol's works, but it seems to give credence to the long-discredited notion of certain people belonging to others. On the other hand The New York Times did a decent write up on Josh Kornbluth's "Warhol: Is It Good for the Jews?" monologue : ...Mr. Kornbluth didn’t attend a synagogue and never had a bar mitzvah. His mother spoke Yiddish, but culturally his family members identified more as Americans than as Jews. His father rejected his Jewish faith and taught his children about Marx, Engels ...

My 20 Albums: It's the annoying new Facebook thing! Here is what you're supposed to do: Think of 20 albums, CDs, LPs that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life. Dug into your soul. Music that brought you to life when you heard it. Royally affected you, kicked you in the wasu, literally socked you in the gut, is what I mean. Then when you finish, tag 20 others, including me. Make sure you copy and paste this part so they know the drill. Top 20 records for facebook: nomi made me do it First, I love how this is a kind of infantilism, a celebration of the adolescent, a way to collect records on the brink of forty when I haven’t listened to a “record” in maybe twenty years and haven’t had time to listen to anything other than npr in the morning and Thomas the Tank Engine DVDs at night in like two years. That having been said…and not exceptin’ the warm graces of YouTube playing live Roxy Music like I’da killed to see in high school in the background at night whil...

I was at an intimate dinner Sunday night to benefit Tehiyah Day School. I'm on the Board this year. SF Jewish Federation CEO Daniel Sokatch spoke at the home of Andrew Greenberg of Greenberg Qualitative . Sokatch's great. Wrote about him as new, young leader earlier . He talked about new Jewish engagement and philanthropy as based on Four Pillars - Change, Torah, Service..and? I dunno. olomot , maybe? As in "worlds," or multiple layers of identity? He was so eloquent and fast and right now it's early on a Monday, the first Monday off of Daylight Savings...I'm gonna see if I can source his talk from either him or somewhere he's posted it. Service was the big concept. He got all Obama-ed out. It was great! More on all this later.

When asked at the Director's Luncheon at the California Association of Museum what I thought the most interesting development for museums in the year ahead, I said it was the trend nationally toward the not-for-profit model -- in the media, with new technology, inspired by our new administration. I said we should all face the challenges ahead in our industry with a renewed pride, that I always felt like an outsider in my early career when my other friends were in business and now the world's looking at new means to better validate the bottom-bottom line, that mission-driven businesses were the new trend -- looking at what Marc Benioff is saying, etc. I felt like I got a lot of blank looks in response. Maybe I gotta get to different conferences. Today's NYTimes focuses on Mother Jones as a not-for-profit model .

Web Tech Guy and Angry Staff Person View more presentations from edsonm . (tags: change strategy )

I am right now helping to make this a longer, feature documentary, working with a group of volunteers, supporting Bill Chayes . Victor Ries was for some time an artist in-residence at the MAGNES .

From last November: Vivek Kundra Rumored Working on Obama Transition Nov 20, 2008, By Matt Williams, Assistant Editor Buzz is growing among insiders that Vivek Kundra, the chief technology officer of Washington, D.C., is advising President-elect Barack Obama's transition team. Kundra's portfolio of work appears to complement a goal in Obama's technology agenda to "use cutting-edge technologies to create a new level of transparency, accountability and participation for America's citizens." Of course, Kundra's close proximity to the U.S. Capitol doesn't hurt. Kundra declined comment Wednesday about his rumored involvement with the Obama administration. Washington, D.C., Mayor Adrian Fenty appointed Kundra the District of Columbia's CTO in March 2007, and Kundra has quickly made a name for himself as an innovator who is unafraid of new ideas. Last week, Kundra and Fenty announced winners of the district's Apps for Democracy contest, which challeng...

I can't quite get away from how much this image reminds me of a man I've worked with Lorne Buchman. Lorne's the former President of the California College for Arts & Crafts (CCAC). Lorne helped develop the SF Campus of what's now CCA. There's a plaque near the door that the Board dedicated to Lorne. What's in a man's life? What's in a man's life story? What do we leave? A book? A movie? A collective project? Memory? When Ari Folman was accepting his award from the Film Critics, he seemed most proud of the babies born amongst those working on the film during its production. Lorne Buchman now heads the American Society of the University of Haifa and is President of Saybrook .

Israeli filmaker Ari Folman was interviewed by Deborah Solomon in The New York Times magazine back on Jan. 11, 2009. I was struck by the interview at the time, because I knew I wanted to see the movie and thought it was important. I've now seen the movie. I saw it with my dad when he visited last. The main thing I liked about this interview was: D. Solomon: The problem with therapy is that you're listening to no one but yourself. How can you learn anything? ...I liked the film.

"Walt Disney had built the Versailles of the twentieth century - but it was a Versailles for the pleasure of the people rather than the amusement of the nobility." The Art of Walt Disney (1995)

Tonight I went to the Naomie Kremer Opening at the DOWNTOWN MAGNES . I also went to a book signing for Here There Are No Sarahs , a Jewish partisan's life story as captured by Fred Rosenbaum and co-published by MAGNES and RDR Books . The book is the life story of Sonia Orbuch . Complimenting the event was an installation of scanned photographs by Faye Shulman collectively entitled Pictures of Resistance put together by Mitch Braff and the Jewish Partisans Educational Foundation .

As part of the Magnes WINDOWS series , the latest installation is by Israeli-born, Berkeley-living artist Naomie Kremer . The WINDOWS series was launched to use the Magnes new facility to positive effect, namely as public art to be viewed at night: to bring more cultural content to downtown Berkeley and in the evenings when the street traffic is less -- to light up the night. Kremer's opening was this evening and we had a really nice turn out, including important local patrons of the arts, collectors etc. Here pictured are Jeff and Jane Green , Penny Cooper (one of the Bay Area's finest collections, focused primarily on women artists with her wife Rena Rosenwasser ). Here Naomie introduces her video piece on Bluebeard's Castle, by Bela Bartok .