Gerald E. Myers, a scholarly expert on the philosopher William James who expressed his missionary zeal for modern dance through the highly unusual position of philosopher in residence of the American Dance Festival, died Feb. 11 at his home in New London, Conn. He was 85.
Although you might associate the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk with the shouts and screams of summer, now, in fact, is one of the best times to visit. Without the sticky crowds there are no lines for the roller coasters or the corn dogs, and from now until the end of May, all of the rides are open on weekends, weather permitting. And when the rumble of the rides and the buzz and jitter of the video games in the arcade become too much, you can always take a walk along the beach and skip stones into Monterey Bay."Get a green cart: Potato peels, lobster shells, chicken bones, coffee grounds, even paper napkins and greasy pizza boxes. Once upon a time, those things went into the garbage, but now through urban compost programs, residents in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and other cities in Alameda, San Mateo and Contra Costa counties can chuck their food scraps into a green cart to be turned into black gold and returned to the soil of Bay Area farms. Apartment renters, ask your landlord to get a green cart for the whole building, and they'll even give you individual kitchen pails for each apartment and instructions on what to compost. Contact your city's public works department for more information."
Sic transit the company of Balanchine...Darci Kistler, the last remaining ballerina at New York City Ballet to have been molded and hired by its co-founder George Balanchine, plans to retire in the 2010 season, she said on Wednesday.Read more at the NYTimes.That would complete three decades with the company, where Balanchine singled her out at the tender age of 17 in 1982 to become a principal, after only two years there.
“As it’s happened with every dancer, there’s a certain point where you realize, ‘I want to go off the stage gracefully,’ ” Ms. Kistler, 44, said in a telephone interview. “I just felt it was time.”
Ms. Kistler said she wanted to devote more of her day to teaching at the School of American Ballet, affiliated with the company, where she has been leading a hefty schedule of classes for 15 years. And the aches and pains that come with age have taken their toll, she said.
Today, after more than a year of planning, 2000 square meters of rooftops have been covered with photos of the eyes and faces of the women of Kibera. The material used is water resistant so that the photo itself will protect the fragile houses in the heavy rain season. The train that passes on this line through Kibera at least twice a day has also been covered with eyes from the women that live below it. With the eyes on the train, the bottom half of the their faces have be pasted on corrugated sheets on the slope that leads down from the tracks to the rooftops. The idea being that for the split second the train passes, their eyes will match their smiles and their faces will be complete.
This new work, by far JR's most ambitious to date, can be seen from space and will be seen in Google Earth.
A decade ago, the word 'foxtrot' might have brought to mind only a newspaper cartoon, and 'tango' conjured up an image of stalking about like Groucho Marx with a rose in his teeth. But when Australian choreographer Jason Gilkison first worked on 'Burn the Floor,' he hoped to evolve the foxtrot and the tango for the 21st century, while getting back to the heart of what moves dance audiences.
These days, identity and the question of how we forge that identity are a hot topic - and a complicated one at that. The fluidity of self-categorization is eloquently investigated in Sean Dorsey's 'Uncovered: The Diary Project,' an evening made up of two dance-theater pieces - 'Lost/Found' and the world-premiere 'Lou' - which opened at the Dance Mission Theater on Thursday and runs through Sunday.The Coyote Point Recreation Area is a fabulous spot for hikes, beach strolls or just watching low-flying 747s sweep into nearby San Francisco airport. It's also the home to the Coyote Point Museum, a small gem of a wildlife center.Read more at the SF Chronicle website.
On Sunday, the museum starts a program of free admission on the first Sunday of each month. While there are many wildlife residents of the museum's outdoor habitats, the star attraction has to be Leroy, the 20-year-old North American river otter and oldest living male river otter in captivity.
Like many folks of a certain age, Leroy has lost a few teeth, but that doesn't stop him from happily gumming down whole fish as he slithers in the water to the delight of onlookers at his daily feedings.
This weekend and for the next few months, you can get more than a glimpse of one of the most unusual animals in California wildlife just off Highway 1, an hour and a half south of San Francisco. Each year, thousands of elephant seals come back to the beaches of Año Nuevo State Reserve, where hundreds of new pups will be born, and the adult males will duke it out with each other and find a female to mate with before returning to the ocean.
Explore four of the city's liveliest museums - the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Museum of the African Diaspora, Zeum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - as they and the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival offer activities, performances and free admission as part of Target's Family Day on Sunday.
From bottles, cans and cigarette butts to old tires and oil drums, the tons of trash that litter our beaches and waterways also chokes the marine ecosystem and endangers wildlife. But on Saturday, tens of thousands of Californians will join in what the Guinness Book of World Records has deemed the world's largest trash collection effort: Coastal Cleanup Day.It's the perfect project for families, school groups, scout troops or community organizations, says the Marine Mammal Center's Ann Bauer.
In 2007, more than 60,000 volunteer cleaners removed 900,000 pounds of trash and recyclable materials from California's shores. In the Bay Area, you can come out between 9 a.m. and noon to one of dozens of sites, grab a trash bag and a check-off sheet and join in the pickup.
Read more on the SF Chronicle site.
Officially speaking, San Mateo doesn't have a town square, but surely Central Park qualifies as the heart of the city.Planted in downtown San Mateo, and only a few minutes' walk from the Caltrain station, Central Park has become the go-to place for the community for everything from music and theater festivals that draw thousands to impromptu family picnics on a hot Sunday.
On a balmy Thursday night in July, the lawn was jammed with dancers and picnickers taking in the Central Park Music Series, an annual summer tradition. The lawn was carpeted with blankets and lawn chairs, and dancers from ages 6 to 60 were grooving away at this year's closing concert, featuring San Francisco reggae band Native Elements.
Founded in 1934 in the basement of the local elementary school, the Junior Museum has since grown into a beloved small gem in Palo Alto. The indoor museum area features rotating exhibits and lots of mechanical activities of the hands-on variety, showing how gears work or letting kids play with air bellows. If you can pry kids away from the activities, out the back door is a small but highly appealing zoo with a bevy of critters that range from the tame (turtles, snakes and ducks) to the exotic (peacocks) to the wild (bobcats and a leopard shark). Many of the zoo's residents were carefully chosen as representatives of the local wildlife - an effort to foster understanding about the creatures that share the Bay Area with humans. It seems to be working: The kids cluster around the owl and ooh and ahh as it swivels its head 180 degrees. At a larger cage, visitors crane their necks to look at a red-tailed hawk while others brush past to see the fruit bats.
Read more on the SF Chronicle website.
