The World Outside Your Door: Classical Revolution San Francisco

At the Pause Wine Bar on Market Street in San Francisco, I witnessed the Classical Revolution. Founded by violist Charith Premawardhana in 2006, Classical Revolution brings live classical music out of the concert halls and into popular local venues--bars, coffee shops and taverns--where the dress is casual, the atmosphere is friendly and relaxed, and the goal is to have fun in a familiar place you share with neighbors and friends.

Apologies for the poor (nonexistent) lighting in the video. In the pic, Charith is on the viola at the far right. I don't know the names of the other musicians. Charith founded Classical Revolution at the Revolution Cafe in the city's Mission District. Since then, the movement has spread to cities across the United States, Europe and Asia (see http://www.classicalrevolution.com/).

For information about Classical Revolution in Cleveland see http://classicalrevolutioncle.com/ or on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ClassicalrevolutionCLE) . And see my article in the Lakewood Observer http://www.lakewoodobserver.com/read/2011/10/19/a-classical-revolution-comes-to-the-root-cafe.

The World Outside Your Door: Grace Episcopal in San Francisco

Joan Didion, in her 1976 essay “James Pike: American,” recalls the Grace Episcopal Church of her childhood memories, its “big rose windows” glowing at night, as the “nexus of all old California money,” a monument to the state’s pioneer history, emblematic of a perpetual quest and as such a spiritual work-in progress whose construction would never be “finished”—that is, until Bishop James Pike, a man in a hurry to be on the cutting edge of everything, would arrive on the scene in 1964, raise $3 million and pronounce Grace “finished.” In this way, Grace and the story of Pike—a quintessential figure of the 1960s who would die wandering around in the Judean desert—become a parable for an American (or, anyway, Californian) tendency to discard history in the  quest for the “new.”

Its a beautiful structure and I caught it on a late afternoon with the setting sun burnishing the face of the Cathedral.

You Really Need to Lighten Up

You really need to lighten up.....Something I have heard more than once in my life. My father told me this on a couple of occassions. So this will be a feature for this blog, which I want to revive and which seems to me entirely too precious and solemn.

Border collies! How cool are they? Alas, mine doesn't play volleyball.