For the first time, the San Francisco Giants celebrated a World Series title with a victory parade through their city, and in so doing certainly established several baseball parade firsts:
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All around the world, Jerry Garcia has been remembered as one of the most talented musicians.
“Days Between” is much more than just a title of a Grateful Dead song for the people of San Francisco. The days between August 1 and August 9 marked the memories of Jerry Garcia, the luminous guitarist of all time.
The famous musician and songwriter, Jerry Garcia is memorized by the people of San Francisco every year on these days, as Aug 1, 1942, marks his birthday and Aug 9, 1995, marks his death.
The iconic musician Jerry Garcia died of heart attack and left ineradicable impressions on the lives of many.
The year 2010 marks the 15th death anniversary of the legendary Jerry Garcia. His fans continue to honor Jerry Garcia in diverse ways. Whether by naming a park amphitheater after him or by naming an ice cream after him, his fans continue to pay tribute to Jerry Garcia.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
(12-08) 20:43 PST — San Francisco’s budget deficit for next year has grown to $575.6 million – equal to nearly half the city’s discretionary spending account. It’s a financial crisis Mayor Gavin Newsom called one of the worst the city has experienced since the 1930s.
Newsom will announce his plan for cutting up to $125 million from this year’s $6.6 billion budget today, but gave few details about what it will include.
“This is nothing we’ve seen before,” he told The Chronicle. “As difficult as these cuts will be, the real challenge is in the next three, four, six months.”
Today’s announcement is expected to include proposals to cancel police academy classes, lay off some high-paid attorneys and cut health services, including outpatient treatment programs for the mentally ill and drug addicted.
One thing that won’t be part of the mayor’s cuts package: slashing by 50 percent the city funds given to the Symphony, Opera and Ballet. Supervisor Aaron Peskin called for such cuts last week; if adopted, they would save the city about $1.1 million.
Peskin is also expected to present pages of cost-cutting ideas today, including the arts proposal, as a way to prevent deep cuts to the Department of Public Health and instead spread the pain around.
But Newsom said that while those three cultural institutions and the American Conservatory Theater, the Museum of Modern Art and the Exploratorium will see a 7 percent cut, the 50 percent idea is unnecessary.
“It’s more symbolic than substantive,” he said of Peskin’s proposal. “I want to deal with the real problem, which is hundreds of millions of dollars and not hundreds of thousands.”
Peskin declined to comment Monday.
Salary givebacks or wage freezes from the unions will also not be part of today’s announcement. Newsom said that will have to be part of the budget talks for the 2009-10 year, which starts July 1.
He said he doesn’t necessarily want the Police Officers Association to give back its coming 7 percent pay hike, though, because San Francisco police officers make less than those in small Bay Area cities like Berkeley, Fairfield and Fremont, making recruitment difficult.
This year the mayor had control over about $1.2 billion in discretionary spending, with the rest of the city budget required by law to be spent in specific ways.
Nani Coloretti, the mayor’s budget director, said the midyear cuts will help because programs and positions eliminated now will mean continued savings next year.
“It means you feel pain over 18 months, not over 12,” she said.
Downgrading positions and charging enterprise departments like Muni more for city services are also ways to save money without eliminating entire programs, she said.
Coloretti and Steve Kawa, the mayor’s chief of staff, have been making the rounds to supervisors’ offices in recent days to prepare them for today’s extensive budget cuts.
However, supervisors said the mayor’s representatives have not shared many specifics during these meetings and some have complained they’ve been left in the dark.
Newsom countered that “the board will have ample time to deal with the real issue, which is next year’s budget.”
Chronicle staff writer Marisa Lagos contributed to this report. E-mail Heather Knight at hknight@sfchronicle.com.
AMHERST – For many fans of the Grateful Dead, the band’s songs are more than music, they’re a home.
The wandering rock guitar rifts of Jerry Garcia, the deep, soulful voice of Bob Weir, the driving bass lines of Phil Lesh and the primal drumming of Mickey Hart built a kind of mobile home for the band’s estimated 500,000 diehard fans, the Deadheads.
This musical community and why the Dead keeps on trucking is the subject of symposium last weekend at the University of Massachusetts. “Unbroken Chain” explored the band’s social, economic, musical and historic impact on America.
“It’s really about one thing: getting your mind blown,” said Jeffrey King, a 46-year-old Merrick, N.Y., man who has attended 300 Grateful Dead concerts. “When something like (the Grateful Dead’s music) occurs in a group of people, a sense of community, musicianship and intellectualism is born.”
On Friday morning, King, along with hundreds of Deadheads from around the country, congregated at UMass for the symposium’s inaugural address, “Strangers Stopping Strangers: The Deadhead Community.”
The gathering felt more like a family reunion than an academic festival, as people dressed in jeans, well-worn sweaters, Bohemian shirts and vests hugged each other and shared concert stories.
Why thousands of people, separated by hundreds of miles and a lack of communication between concerts, have formed a thriving subculture that persists are among the questions that University of North Carolina sociology professor Rebecca Adams tried to address in “Strangers Stopping Strangers.”
Adams leads the Deadhead Community Project, a collection of sociological field notes and surveys collected by Adams and some of her students beginning in 1989. The research has since been condensed into five analytical books.
Deadheads, Adams explained, elevated the band’s music from mere albums to a subculture based on the spiritual experience of attending Grateful Dead shows.
“The music brought people together, even though they didn’t live near one another. Their friendship was the basis for the portable community,” said Adams, who is an unabashed Deadhead.
“It’s difficult to explain how we all feel inside,” Adams said, trying to give words to what it is like to listen to the Grateful Dead. “It’s like talking about or describing why we love another person.”
Deadheads had a lot to bond and form friendships over, Adams said. In addition to their love of the Dead’s wildly improvised, but fluid music, the fans connected over their dedication to charity (providing free food, concert tickets and shelter, among other things, to fellow concertgoers), the “dirty hippie” stigma attached to the group by non-fans, and drug use.
But perhaps the most important link between Deadheads is spirituality, the feeling that attending a Grateful Dead concert is a religious and enlightening experience.
“It’s a multilayered experience for true Deadheads,” said Paul Freedman, 58, of Washington, D.C., trying to describe the importance of the Dead’s music. “It’s like flat land and then the Dead comes along and says, ‘No you’re a cube, man.’ It opens up different dimensions, different ways to think about things, to experience things. It’s not just music, it’s a live culture.”
“Unbroken Chain” is part of a semester-long graduate history seminar titled “American Beauty: Music, Culture and Society, 194595,” and an undergraduate course titled “How Does the Song Go: The Grateful Dead as a Window into American Culture.”
The Grateful Dead study was made possible by Dennis McNally, the Grateful Dead’s longtime publicist, who earned his doctorate in history at UMass in 1978.
“We all know this is a special trip,” McNally said in his opening remarks Friday. “I’m very proud to come back here and do this.”
In the future, UMass plans to hold similar studies that focus intensely on a single aspect of American culture.
“I was afraid people would look at this as a joke, not as a rigorous academic investigation, just some aging hippies back on campus,” said John Mullin, dean of the UMass graduate school. “We’re here because this is a new way of giving knowledge. This will be the first of [a number of] deep interdisciplinary looks into different cultural aspects of life.”
Symposium activities included more than 50 presenters for 20 panel sessions, ranging from music composition and improvisation to an examination of the band’s business model. The weekend also included concerts, gallery exhibits and presentations.
The New York Herald Sun 