Empowers You !
Enjoy optimal shopping
w/ these top 2 powerful deal mining
Places to Stay
sites HotelsCombined: Search Hotel Prices on Over 30 Sites at Once!search
multiple sites, find hidden fees and support fresh,
unedited reviews.
Save the most but shop carefully
at Hostelbookers with
hostels
and cheap accommodatios for
you in all the world's major cities.
Power Travel Portals
Find a wide range of
products and travel tools including: trip insurance, multi-stop flights & last
minute deals! through our
TraveloCity powered Affiliate
site
Pays to shop, especially when booking
Air, Hotels & Cars.
TIP:
Booking early and developing options by checking for new discount
airlines at you destination through wikipedia as well as getting
candid fresh hotel reviews can be done efficiently
using our Image Server
Minerva,the goddess that is affixed to all California State legislation as the Queen of the state seal is shown here visiting the nine muses.
Ovid describes (Met. 5:250-268) how Minerva visited the Muses on Mt Helicon, their home, to listen to their song and story and to see the sacred spring, the Hippocrene, which flowed from a rock after it had been struck by the hoof of the winged horse, Pegasus. The scene is a wooded mountain-side where the company of Muses are playing their instruments or perusing books. Pegasus is seen in the background. The association of Minerva and the Muses was in line with the tradition that made her patroness of the arts.
Dance has been a magical means to preserve the rhythms and collective wisdom of the ancestors as well embodying the hopes and joys of all the tribes by common shared traditions. Dance represents a heightened form of listening to your body and your feelings. Dance, and the arts since 1979, have been unable to sustain funding at adequate levels and California is consistently rated the worst state in the nation or school arts funding.
A rare opportunityto reopen the discussion on restoring an arts curriculum to the schools as the rule rather than the exception.
Brenda Way, the extraordinarily successful dance entrepreneur hopes to awaken senses.
Although it’s only seven square miles, San Francisco supports a vigorous dance community that includes world-class ballet and modern troupes as well as small modern and ethnic dance companies. In fact the San Francisco Bay Area supports dance as an artform more than any other region in the world.
As Carnaval San Francisco begins its 4th decade we must once again see so many cost effective excellent festival school arts programs regress.
Funding for dance and the arts in California schools for many decades has been far below all but the poorest states and countries.
Carnaval San Francisco has long supported parade Carnaval productions for the schools as a powerful cost-effective way to address this.
Unfortunately, 2009 has been a rough year for most programs and the future remains uncertain.
Hope springs eternal. For now we need to encourage strong advocates to step forward and see that this message is heard as truth to power. Who cannot be impressed with the opening of the West Coast's best dance facility by Brenda Way and her ODC dance group.
Brenda Way Born out of rebellion against ballet and the status quo, modern dance's most famous pioneers include San Francisco-born Isadora Duncan and California-bred Martha Graham. Modern dance began on the West Coast, in California where the demise of school programs leaves young people without a language for talking about artistic work.
Way says, "Young artists just want you to like their work....In the beginning, in the '60s, there were filmmakers, performance artists, it was an interdisciplinary group." She worked with musicians who were experimenting with time units and choreographed pieces that transposed these musical ideas to physical ideas. She also began including verbal text in her dances and incorporated improvisation. Eventually these physical experiments developed into the breezy, athletic style of ODC/SF today she told Kathryn Roszak Castle of theatrebayarea.org.
"I have a fundamental political nature," says Way. "In the early days of making dances there was this feeling of 'Are all your women dykes because they are so strong?' It's a politics of redefinition. I find the present the most frightening time of my life. So, I'm acting locally and thinking globally. I'm seeing a disconnect culturally. So, I want an expanded arts center with a kid's curriculum, programs for families. Our sensibilities are getting deadened. I hope to awaken the senses." wikipedia.org/Brenda_Way
On the Gift of Art to a Child
Alonzo King: I think the gift of art is a glimpse into the answer to the questions that everyone is asking: Why am I here? Where am I going? Who am I. Art has to be part of education. To take the fertile and open mind of a child and harden it by extracting all of their possibilities for new thought is cruel. It is like planting the same crop in the same soil year after year after year. The soil is stripped and ruined.
Brenda Way: I was thinking of my impulse to dance in the 60's and my wish to replace theatrical artifice with an intense experiential relationship to life. There is a reason why contemporary dance really took off in this country. It was related to a hands-on American spirit to build and make things and to come up with new ways of looking at things. Making something from nothing is what dance is. You have the most marvelous metaphor for how children might go about their lives: Take hold and make something form what you have, just what you have.
(born 19 June 1974) is a US actress. She graduated with honors from both Stanford University and Stanford Business School. She worked in Africa, Latin America, and Europe on assignments for Conservation International, a global environmental organization.Her father Ken is an investment manager and cofounder of Conservation International and her mother Judy is cofounder of the Bay Area Discovery Museum in Sausalito. On 26 July 2008, Siebel became 'first lady' of San Francisco when she married Mayor Gavin Newsom. It is her first marriage. Siebel and Newsom are expecting their first child, a baby girl.
The Race for Governor 2010
Mayor Gavin Newsom is a candidate for higher office. Will the candidate for governor from San Francisco, the City with the most artists per capita in the country, restore programs to the schools?
"It is going to cause quite a stir as people aren't used to seeing a political figure like this," director Gene Rhee told Tarts. "But I just hope people judge her (Jennifer) for her amazing performance not for her political associations."
Jennifer Siebel Newson, is on the big screen in a film released Feb-2009 called "The Trouble with Love," which includes a racy threesome sex scene.
Huffington Post quotes Jennifer on her role in the film: "It's always a little awkward (filming intimate scenes) but I'm a dancer and an athlete so I have a more tomboy figure so I just went for it," Newsom admitted. "The film was a challenge, but fun." The Trouble with Romance (2009) ||
Ms. Gust has served as Special Counsel to the Attorney General of the State of California since January 2007 whom she married in 2005. She is summoned to resolve complex legal wranglings and advise her husband on policy.
Gust ran her husband's 2006 attorney general campaign and key player as he runs for an encore as California governor in 2010.Friends say their relationship is forged in a remarkable union of voracious readers and learners with complementary styles and instincts.
Everybody embraces the arts for the schools but unfortunately it continues to be among the first cuts in difficult budget years. Mayor Jerry Brown's main youth initiative as Mayor of Oakland (1998-2006),was charter schools including a resource intensive military academy. He sparred with Carnival artists over shutting down the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts (formerly Alice Arts center) with many community based dance programs for a charter school. The only ethnic arts parade (students as stars not as the audience!) in Oakland -Carijama (the day after Carnaval San Francisco)was discontinued on his watch as well. However, Anne Guste was not his chief advisor during this time.
Gust, a graduate of Stanford and the University of Michigan Law School, is known as someone quick to cut through highbrow debate and focus on solutions.
"Jerry met his match in Anne," said Lauri Shanahan, Gust's best friend and a fellow lawyer who followed her as general counsel and chief administrative officer at Gap Inc. "I think of her as his thought partner.
"He is an insatiable learner, and Anne is so provocative to him. She is wicked smart. She does not bow to him on whatever is on his brain. As you know, there are about 10,000 things a day. She just cuts through it."
Not known for any interest in the "glare of the spotlight," they began dating during his 3rd run for the US Presidency. It would take 15 years of dating before Brown, the philosopher pol and perpetual bachelor, and Gust, who never saw herself as someone eager to get married, tied the knot. He was 67. She was 47.
Jerry Brown has run for President of the USA 3 times in his career. He dated Linda Rondstat in the 70's. He is favorite in 2010 govenor race
Gust married longtime boyfriend Jerry Brown in Oakland's Rotunda Building. Dianne Feinstein officiated at the ceremony. Guests included Gray Davis and Willie Brown. As Mayor he pushed priorities that differed from those he had earlier in his career: vigorously fighting crime, bringing business downtown, and encouraging charter schools. Brown was elected attorney general by a wide margin, despite an earlier reputation for appointing soft on crime judges.
Prior to joining The Gap, Inc., Ms. Gust was a lawyer at the firms of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP and Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison LLP.
Maria Shriver (born November 6, 1955) is an award-winning American journalist, author and First Lady of California. She is married to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and is a member of the Kennedy family. After a long, distinguished career in TV journalism, Shriver announced that she will not return to news media after the excessive media coverage of the death of Anna Nicole Smith. Since Governor Schwarzenegger took office, Maria has visibly supported her husband and has taken on several key initiatives as first lady - raising awareness of the contributions of women to the state, working on practical solutions to end cycles of poverty and encouraging all Californians to engage in acts of service to their communities.
In 1977, Tom Brokaw introduced Maria to Austrian bodybuilder and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger at a charity tennis tournament being held at her mother Eunice Kennedy Shriver's home. She married Schwarzenegger on April 26, 1986 in Hyannis, Massachusetts, at St. Francis Xavier Roman Catholic Church. They have four children: Katherine Eunice Schwarzenegger (born December 13, 1989 in Los Angeles, California); Christina Maria Aurelia Schwarzenegger (born July 23, 1991 in Los Angeles, California); Patrick Arnold Shriver Schwarzenegger (born September 18, 1993 in Los Angeles, California);and Christopher Sargent Shriver Schwarzenegger (born September 27, 1997 in Los Angeles, California)[8]
On Sundays, Shriver and her family attend Mass at St. Monica's Catholic Church in Santa Monica, California
Maria have remained closely involved in Special Olympics, an organization founded by Maria's mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver. In 1990, the President recognizing her husband's passion for helping kids, appointed Governor Schwarzenegger Chair of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, in which capacity he traveled all 50 states and recognized the overwhelming need for more after-school alternatives. In 2002, Governor Schwarzenegger support for Proposition 49, the After-School Education & Safety Act, led it to overwhelming victory. As Governor, he has aggressively worked to increase after-school funding, making California the first state in the nation to significantly invest in a comprehensive after-school program.
"If Barack was a state, he'd be California. Think about it: Diverse, open, smart, independent, bucks tradition, innovative, inspiring, dreamer, leader. And the one thing I like about him the most is that he is about us." On February 3, 2008, Shriver endorsed the candidacy of Senator Barack Obama for the Democratic Presidential Nomination in 2008. The endorsement was given at a rally held at the University of California, Los Angeles featuring Caroline Kennedy, Oprah Winfrey, Stevie Wonder and the candidate's spouse, Michelle Obama. Governor Schwarzenegger had previously endorsed Senator John McCain for the Republican Presidential nomination a few days earlier on January 31, 2008. Obama on Education
The Race for Governor 2010
Shriver has been part of Gov. Schwarzenegger’s inner circle and a political force in her own right. Unfortunately, the record shows that Arnold Schwarzenegger administration, despite coming in with one of the best records anywhere on after school program funding and despite both coming from the media industry much more dependent on creative minds than most, did abandon the field on arts funding. The schools and community arts programs have had to give up time and time again on the once great state of California symbolized by Minerva Queen of the Muses.
RSS NEWS FEEDS: Mark Morford's column || California + Arts +Schools || Maria Shiver Arts
Jennifer Siebel Newson, is on the big screen in a film released Feb-2009 called "The Trouble with Love," which includes a racy threesome sex scene. 
