Arts & Culture

The music you’re hearing is being played by Myra Melford. She’s on sabbatical from UC Berkeley at present, which gives her time for some performances off campus. She says she continually reaches toward a state of transcendence with her music, yet there’s always a connection to the blues traditions she heard growing up, near Chicago. 

At one time jazz saxophonist Anton Schwartz, who you’re hearing now, was an academic in the field of Artificial Intelligence. And while he decided to abandon that to play music full time, he is still found in front of students – but now he’s a faculty member of The Jazzschool in Berkeley, and at the Stanford Jazz Workshop.  

The Anton Schwartz Quintet is scheduled to perform on Saturday, March 1st in Pacifica, at the Mildred Owen Concert Hall. Music begins at 7:30pm.

It may have been passed over for an Oscar nomination, but the New York Times calls The Lunchbox a Bollywood anomaly - a  quiet movie of unexpressed anguish and yearning instead of movies that clutch viewers by the throat and assault them with glamour, pizazz and dancing.

But what’s really surprising about  The Lunchbox is it actually really made a splash in India with a love story so low key, so subtle, one can hardly call it a romance. The lovers don’t meet. They just exchange notes in a lunchbox. Real handwritten notes . About life. And food.

A couple on an evening stroll down Valencia Street comes to a stop outside Lost Weekend Video. They’re peering in through the big front window.

“I wanted to check it out because I haven’t seen a video store in a long time,” says Abel Martinez. “These days I watch a lot of pirated movies.”

There’s a place in San Francisco that brings together the sounds of the world. From Ethiopian Jazz to Brazilian tropicalia to Norwegian thrash metal and even the songs of bats.