loveitallabove

O.K., so Hillary had Elvis Costello at her very most recent birthday, which'd be swell. abc.com plays it here (following a promo by Emmitt Smith for the Arthur Murray Dance Studios). I would just love that. And if there's another band/person what'd make me feel complete from the eighties, my late adolescent street, to perform at MY next birthday as a fund raiser, it's XTC . Tho, I might wanna tip my hat to Echo and the Bunnymen and all they had to offer, as well. It's just that the VH1Classic that I watched on the DirectTV broadcast on my jetBlue cross-country return flight from Dulles to Oakland gave me back my XTC, and I was ever so thankful. As I jotted on my pad, seeking solace in crafting language, making marks, taking notes -- I wrote to myself, "I adore the sound of XTC, adventurous and bringing up a fine nostalgia." My next note said that there's a sweet urologist in Maryland that's about to have a baby. And that guy took care of my...

SCENE: Flying jetBlue; watching Blue Öyster Cult video on small screen with distinctive "aged" feel, maybe through cell phone camera. Man burning up inside car. He killed himself in an old America car. "Burning for you." I mean, his head even falls off as he burns inside the car...and the band plays on. This whole, little vignette plays out as I am getting back from Maryland, and after having witnessed some real serious human stuff. Now I am back to my normal reality. And it feels like my movie should be shot on cell-phone quality, and it feels like I should have a crush on the stewardess and it feels like I should be able to reel back every memory of my upbringin' and shove it into this short plane ride.

Austin Powers after the release from his cryostasis . I've been frozen for 30 years. I've gotta see if my bits and pieces are still working. Excuse me? My wedding tackle. I'm sorry-- My meat and two veg, my twig and berries. Hello, lads, you still awake? Thank you, Mr. Myers.

THE SCENE: Flying jetBlue; watching Match Game ; flying out to Maryland from Oakland to go take care of my dad, who has just had major surgery. My father's prognosis is a really good one. And I hope he will be at my son's Bar Mitzvah. Right now my son's only sixteen months old. I made a few notes to myself on the flight. "Who was Gene Rayburn, and what was his background?" was one of them. I classsfied this note under, "Things to blog about," as opposed to the "Emails to look for" categorized notes. As I looked around the innernetz, I found that Charles Nelson Reilly (b. Bronx 1931 - d. L.A., May 25, 2007) just died this year, and Brett Somers just passed away this past September. Further, as I poked around on the web, I was moved to read that Gene's wife of 56 years Helen died in October 1996, and Gene never recovered from the loss. He died of heart failure on November 11, 1999. A really sweet tribute (incl. detail above) is located...

Someone I really respect -- DJ Luscious -- just threw some props out to Lance Hahn, RIP. Jesse's Current mood: numb. "Lance Hahn, guitarist and vocalist for bands including J Church & Cringer, passed away this afternoon after spending a week in a coma from complications from kidney failure. My deepest condolences to Liberty and their families. We've lost one of the good guys today." Such tributes MUST be passed along. Another tribute's here . shoulda known this cat. love to all.

Football commentator Dennis Cometti back in his coaching days. I'd like to link to a specific post on my friend Billy Cometti's blog , but I cannot figger how to do it without a lot of copying what he's got and redoing the code. As far as I can see, his layin' out's so "sophisticated" that you cannot link to just one POST, and say -- go there. He is a producer at the BBC now. So I end up copyin' much of the whole dern thing, like the Rugby piece below. Couldn't it be easier, tho? For example, to link to this post, because I use "blogger," or whatever tool gooooOOOOoooogle's allowing. All you'se gotta do is go to: http://loveitallabove.blogspot.com/2007/10/id-like-to-link.html I encourage you ALL to keep up with Billy Smash , though. Billy and his wife Susan need support. The baby's due any day now. Billy, advertise! Post an ad on your site for plasters , or bonnets or whatever they call diapers over there....really.

O.K. , My friend Billy blogged the following: AMERICAN FOOTBALL: THE GIRLY SPORT The Rugby World Cup is approaching its finals, and one thing has been made perfectly clear to this American ex-pat: American football players are ballerina tutu wearing, Barbie-doll playing, crying little sissy girls playing a sport that is about as masculine as two cheerleaders air-slapping each other in a fight over who gets to use the last tampon in their hello kitty purse. I make no claim to be an expert on Rugby- but here is what should be obvious to even a casual observer. In Rugby, a match takes about 100 minutes from beginning to end. The game is in constant motion, and the players are on the run the entire time. The only break of any kind is for half time. American football games take around 4 hours (240 minutes.) There is a little bit of action every 3 or 4 minutes, if you are lucky. There are constant commercial interruptions, during which time, the NFL players give each other sponge baths and ...

My dad sent me this article about this museum in Russia. I did not get enough time to read the article, so I post it here so I can have a second look ...and share. The photo to the left is from the page entitled "Avdei Ter-Oganyan’s art studio. Berlin." The museums' web page is: http://www.art4.ru/index.php?lg=en The Stones in St. Petersburg DAVID TER-OGANYAN David Ter-Oganyan was born in Rostov-on-Don, 1981, lives and works in Moscow. He attended the Contemporary Art School set up by his father, Avdei Ter-Oganyan, which gave birth to a whole generation of Moscow artists who later created the well-known group Radek. This is not a bomb. The project �This is not a bomb� is a series of objects produced from everyday things, clockwork bits and wires. The project, which is located on the margin of �horrible and comical�, is aimed at a critical conceptualization of the problem of �terrorist threat as nonexistent�. This is not a bomb. Clearly Avdei's boy is really smart...

TO VIEW THE ARTICLE CLICK here .

...hosted a panel conversation today at the Western Museums Association Annual Meeting. The program was called Development Office as Incubator. And the panelists were: Lori Fogarty , Executive Director, Oakland Museum of California Lynne LaMarca Heinrich , Senior Consultant, Marts & Lundy, Inc. W. John “J” Mullineaux , Director of Development, SFMoMA The central theme was: Increased institutional acknowledgment and understanding for comprehensive Development work is a necessary component to sustain museums in the 21st century. it went great...

F*in' Fergie, that's who. WHO?! I gotta tell ya', I remember the first time I ever saw the Black Eyed Peas on T.V., I thought it was a joke, then I thought it was an insult , I mean DISGUSTING. then I thought'd be something that'd disappear before the kids got in from recess. Now,l instead the Black Eyed Peas have taken hold, and Fergie has become bigger than, well... In more important news , QUOTING "SHOUTMOUTH" -- Fergie has finally admitted that her song "Fergalicious" S-U-C-K-E-D. "London Bridge" and "Fergalicious" were definitely more surface songs. I have a very serious side as well, and it's completely different, and you don't know whether people are going to embrace that or not. She's right. Not just about those songs being garbage, but about the serious side. It's easy to forget this, considering her last four singles were "Glamorous," "Fergalicious," "London Bridge" ...

So I was at "Music & Me" class with Emil and Karen. Karen's my wife and Emil's our 15 1/2 month old son. And Terence Trent D'Arby was playing, on the cd player. thing is -- I mummbled every word and the teacher was all, "How do you know every word?" Well, Terence Trent D'Arby was really big for me. Freshman year of college. Saw him on Saturday Night Live, live at the studio -- thanks David Hantman. And at the Beacon Theater, or was it called s'em else?...I think it was the Beacon. Anyone who knows nyc of the late 80's remember the venue of 12th or 13th street, what was 'tween Fourth and Third? It was the same year I saw Dwight Yoakam and Mötörhead. I think I saw Hüsker Dü, for the second time there -- seein' HüDü for the first time in DC was one of my biggest High School experiences. Thing is that then the "Music and Me" teacher asked if I had any idea what happened to Terence Trent D'Arby. mmm. TTD was big ...

O.K. in a lot of ways the innernetz is jus' one big commercial, right?...'xcepting we all get to advertise our ideas and it's the biggest place for advocacy the world's ever seen. And, a music video is by-definition a commercial, right?...even if it is a real art-full piece...and a commercial for an iPod, is DEFINITELY a commercial, right? thing is, that the Feist iPod commercial is wonderful. it's campy, dated and out-of-touch, but there's something kinda infectious about the song and limitless about the video -- sorta RENT meets All That Jazz (an' sorta hate both of 'em I do; but each have this innate nostalgia that resonates), but with a deep understanding that Fosse died of major cigarette smoking heart related illness and that "saccharine" is, in fact, a killer -- a Live for the Now, balanced by a sadness that comes with loss. not sure i'll feel the same way two weeks or two years from now, but... If you want to see the entire video ...

to quote their site: The reactable is a collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible multi-touch interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving and rotating physical objects on a luminous round table surface. By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

Man, my good friend Billy's got a facebook page now and to look at HIS material I had to make a facebook page?! I got too many pages! ('xceptin' by the time I got all logged in, there were technical difficulties and I still couldn't see pictures from his fortieth birthday. bummer.) So, lemme see, now I got: myspaze (suckered in by my friend Gary ). now facebook , cuz of Billy . oh, and i got linkedin cuz you can't get around that these days...originally invited by Sam Salkin . oh, and did I mention just this blog itself, too...that, I think, I first off blamed on/credited to Frances Dinkelspiel . man, these networkz is hard to maintain.

GO AHEAD AND CLICK THE IMAGE and BUY THIS BOOK!! Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage from UCPress site: Destination Culture takes the reader on an eye-opening journey from ethnological artifacts to kitsch. Posing the question, "What does it mean to show?" Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explores the agency of display in a variety of settings: museums, festivals, world's fairs, historical re-creations, memorials, and tourist attractions. She talks about how objects--and people--are made to "perform" their meaning for us by the very fact of being collected and exhibited, and about how specific techniques of display, not just the things shown, convey powerful messages. Her engaging analysis shows how museums compete with tourism in the production of "heritage." To make themselves profitable, museums are marketing themselves as tourist attractions. To make locations into destinations, tourism is staging the wor...

O.K. Here are two links about this new, important project that's finally coming together at MAGNES: UCPress Notice and Yahoo! Finance (my personal favorite, for now...) . Pleaz also see that my musuem's @ Target .

Please see below my dear friend Billy who is now a regular commentor, editor, etc. for the BBC about movies. He is living out his dreams. Thing is, on this one he's gotta talk about having a baby for "Knocked Up," and he and his wife Susan are indeed about to have a baby... And to prove he is my dear friend (and since he is all on the BBC these days, I want to prove he is my dear friend), herewith is a pitcher of him at my wedding ten years ago. Billy's second-from-right. And to for-real show he's my dear friend, I actually got the pitcher from my wedding from his facebook page. Go, Billy! My dear friend Billy.

O.M.G. I found Neva. She "left" the Chronicle, but here she is now: safe and sound on the innernetz. Thank you, Neva, for being so brave to be out (t)here, amongst (them)us. She wrote some time ago about giving up on too many blog addresses, but it looks like her myspace is the one for now... In her last words in the SF Chron she wrote: "I'll ponder these questions and more as they arise ... but not here. I do tend to exaggerate, but I wasn't kidding when I said this would be my final column. My feet are itching, which either means I've contracted fungus or it's time for me to move on. Latest plan: teaching Derrida to Sherpas on Mount Everest. I hear Kathmandu is the place to be. I'll leave a textual trail for those who care to follow it. In closing, I must point out that you're all very strange for spending years reading a column penned by a hideous cartoon..." To see sexy pitcher of Darth Vader, thanks to Neva's web snoofing clic...