Barely 50 miles from downtown Santa Barbara is one of the most fascinating and important parts of the California coastline. Point Conception is the headland where the coast transitions between north-south and east-west orientation, a very rare delineation that works as a natural division between Southern and Northern California. It also marks the location of […]
Santa Barbara stockbroker and former TV executive Howard Jay Smith is facing the music again! Howard, a member of the board of the Santa Barbara Symphony, wrote his third book, Beethoven in Love; Opus 139: Concerto Quasi Una Fantasia, five years ago, and has now penned a suitable follow-up, Meeting Mozart: From the Secret Diaries […]
Recently Trending
More from Montecito
The Montecito foothills are more than a thousand miles from both the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and NASA’s headquarters in Houston – not to mention 234,000 miles from the moon – but the rolling greenery amounts to much more than a footnote for part-time Montecito resident Steven C. Barber spearheading a project to fashion […]
Thanks to the extended lockdown laws on the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, UCSB Arts & Lectures has scrapped its planned live events season slated for February-May in favor of continuing the House Calls and Race to Justice series online. (The updated virtual calendar hadn’t yet been released by our print deadline.) Meanwhile, two of the bigger […]
There is a wonderful art exhibit of 55 naval paintings at the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum awaiting your visit as soon as lockdown is over and executive director Greg Gorga can unlock the doors. The exhibit was scheduled to open December 3, 2020 until May 30, 2021. It’s sponsored by George H. & Olive J. Griffiths […]
TEDxSantaBarbara founder and executive producer Mark Sylvester realized early on as COVID-19 crept into our consciousness that he’d probably have to cancel his annual convention that each fall brings together as many as 10 speakers with local spins on the TED trio of topics (technology, entertainment, and design). That’s when the disappointment set in. “It […]
Former California State Assemblyman Brooks Firestone is giving paws for thought! Brooks, 81, who will be moving with his wife of 62 years, Kate, a former Royal Ballet dancer, into Casa Dorinda from their Santa Ynez Valley home in the New Year, has just published his second volume of animal stories from the valley. The […]
Gordon Frickers, an old friend who used to be my photographer on The Falmouth Packet when I started my career, has morphed into a very competent maritime artist. Now living in Brittany in the north of France after 25 years in the seafaring city of Plymouth, Devon, Gordon has just completed a two-year project of […]
Retired Montecito attorney David Gersh has just completed his new novel Pot Luck, the sequel to his laugh-out-loud award-winning book Desperate Shop Girls, which is being published by Open Books in the New Year. It is the Harvard Law School graduate’s sixth tome, to be closely followed by his seventh, The Whisper of a Distant […]
Read more...
A cabaret for Christmas might seem like the mixing of metaphors, but the idea made a lot of sense for PCPA as a way to produce something during the pandemic. That was partly because a show that’s akin to a revue could be done from people’s homes during lockdown without damaging the storyline. But it […]
PCPA’s 2020 Christmas-season treat is called Home for the Holidays, with the subtitle of “… because where else are you going to be?” Fair enough. With the coronavirus raging all over again, the Central Coast conservatory keeps its virtual programs flowing with a holiday cabaret featuring its resident artists. The free streaming event will be […]
When the pandemic forced interaction to head to the internet, UCSB’s Theater Department quickly picked up the virtual ball and ran with it. Not only classes did move online but the Launch Pad project quickly pivoted to mark its 15th anniversary milestone by having previous participants in the play reading series contribute short pieces to […]
Movie lovers might only know Cheryl Strayed from the film version of her bestselling memoir Wild, which starred Reese Witherspoon in the adaptation of the book that offered alternating harrowing and hilarious stories from Strayed’s solo 1,100-mile trek on the Pacific Crest Trail as well as the personal journey that led her there. But the […]
The Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art celebrates its 10th anniversary with a fundraising exhibition, “5×5: Celebrating Ten Years,” which features about 450, five-inch-square works of art from December 3-18. The art will be available for purchase through an online auction at westmont.edu/museum/5×5 that ends Friday, December 18, at 5 pm. The exhibition, which benefits the […]