Musings on Dance, Food, Geek Stuff
Here’s the gist of my message in Quaker Meeting today: I recently read an article on how the state of boredom is no longer a part of our daily experience. We have in our pockets small devices that allow us to entertain, amuse or at least stimulate us whenever we want, whether it is riding…
Today at Quaker Meeting I was thinking about how the experience of any kind of performance is affected by the format that is received. A symphony listened to from the lawn in Central Park with thousands of other picnickers has little relationship to the same symphony heard from a video recording uploaded to YouTube. And…
In a few days it will be the birthday of Bettina Pruckmayr, an old girlfriend of mine who died a long time ago. I can hardly believe that it was 16 years ago that she was taken from us by an act of evil on December 16, 1995. Bettina was a young human rights lawyer…
Rounding out my tour of local Quaker meetings and churches, on Sunday afternoon I found myself at the simple home of Pam Calvert and Helen Haug in Oakland. Pam and Helen have been holding a Quaker worship group in their home on Sunday afternoons for several years now. I have been wanting to attend this…
Today I finally got to check out the San Francisco Quaker Meeting, almost completing my tour of local Bay Area Quaker communities. A fairly nondescript building on 9th Street near Market, the San Francisco meeting gathers every Sunday at 11am for worship, followed by socializing and committee meetings. This morning there were about 30-40 Friends…
The most amazing time-lapse video ever. Photographer Terje Sorgjerd shot these amazing time-lapse images from El Teide, the highest peak in Spain earlier this month. I wish I had a better word than "awesome," but this simply inspires awe. Watch it in HD, turn up the speakers. Thanks for tweeting this out, Swifty!
So I am walking around an art exhibit with this lovely, smart woman, taking in all of the conceptual art, making snarky remarks that I hope she finds clever. Then I wander into this dark room and see the video above playing. It hits me like a baseball bat to the gut. I find out…
Yesterday, a couple hundred of us gathered at Saint Patrick's Church in Rodeo, California to bid farewell to our beloved Uncle Oscar Santos. It was a beautiful funeral, with a tender eulogy from his pastor Father Larry and sweet remembrances from my cousins Reena and Vicky. Uncle Oscar was a powerful bass singer, and a…
I realized reading through the #QuakerBuses tweets that I had long ago likened Quaker Meeting for Worship (aka "church") to being on the subway. This is a poem I wrote in 1997 called "Subterranean." subterranean I take the subway to churchSharing this unguarded early Sunday spaceWith others seeking their own destinationsTheir own agendas Who can…
I am way behind on this meme, but apparently on a recent episode of "The Stephen Cobert Report," fake news anchorman Cobert was discussing "the best" religions with comparative religions professor Stephen Prothero. At one point, Prof. Prothero describes how Quaker Meeting for Worship is full of a bunch of people sitting together in silence,…