EDITOR’S NOTE / Special California Issue: Our magazine has spent the last three months traveling around the great state of California from North to South. Thus, the majority of this issue is fully immersed in the art, food, culture, and history of California. You will ride along on a first-person road trip from Houston to Southern California, and find our guide to vacationing year round in San Diego. We will give a detailed tour of the grand and luxurious Del Coronado Resort, plus a close-up view in several of California’s best museums: the BROAD, Manet at The Getty and Magritte at SF MoMA. ARTS & FOOD® loves the west coast of the US, and this Sept./Oct. issue is dedicated to the awesome state of California! (Which, we learn in this issue, was named for a fictional island mentioned in 15th-century Spanish literature, located somewhere past the Orient – if you are looking from Europe.)
Other editorial surprises include poetry about major artworks and a “conversation” with Jack Kerouac (an essay on how his literature affected one writer and left a mark on the city of San Francisco). Use our shopper’s guides for looking into jet skis, the latest sit-to-stand desks, and for the ladies, lovely party attire at super sale prices. Of course, you would never want to miss our regular coverage of vegan, vegetarian, comfort food and fine dining recipes, plus insights from “Cooking with Cathy.”
ARTS & FOOD® is an instant guide to the good life – providing information, knowledge and the skills needed to make the best experiences in life available to all! There are only 540 individual billionaires in the United States, if you are not one of them, you too can enjoy 90% of the good life they enjoy! Just keep coming back to www.ARTSandFOOD.com®, that’s our goal! – Jack Atkinson
___________
HELLO! – MY YEAR BEGINS IN SEPTEMBER?
When does your year start? Mine starts in September, but for all of our lives… our teachers, parents, the news media, our wall calendars, basically everyone has told us the year ends on December 31st and a new year starts on January 1st. Why? I don’t know, but it seems a bit illogical. Some calendar makers eons ago decided on these dates, but our current twelve-month calendar doesn’t sync with the way our society functions today.
If January is the start of a new year, why does my old school spiral bound paper desktop planning calendar always start with September? Also, why do the “New Seasons” for the ARTS, the Television Networks, the Art World, the Opera, the Symphony, and so many aspects of contemporary culture, start the new year in the ninth month? For most of us, September is the functional start of a new year!
If we go back to when stargazers started tracking the changing seasons, the equinoxes and solstices, their calendar was directed by the earth’s relation to the sun, the phases of the moon, etc. We now round-up these scientific start and end dates, so they fit comfortably into our twelve-month wall calendar. Few people ever consider the actual dates of the equinoxes and solstices when they are planning their lives, vacations, work or school. In today’s society these astrological events are only mentioned on the evening news and arrive on dates most of us no longer celebrate and we certainly don’t memorize those dates.
If we were to follow nature’s calendar, the first season of the year would logically be Spring’s re-birth (March, April, and May), when the plants put out fresh new foliage and blossoms, plus calving season begins as baby animals are born in the meadows, and farmers start planting their seeds. Then would come Summer – nature’s season for nurturing warmth, growth, sunshine, and rain, (June, July, and August), when farmers weed, water and tend to their crops. Next would be Fall (September, October, and November) when the food producing plants mature and the farming cycle turns to the harvest. The end of the year should be Winter (December, January, February) the time when half of the planet goes dormant, turns cold and slips into a state of hibernation. The farmers clean up the fields and till the dead leftover stalks back into the soil – all before the land freezes and they must stay indoors by the fire, waiting to start again in Spring.
The Chinese celebrate their New Year in early February, which may be considered almost a Spring beginning. February could work as a good start for the Western World, too. We now observe New Year’s Day, a week after America’s month-long party, with holiday celebrations lasting from Thanksgiving through December 25th. Beginnings should be celebrated, with optimism for the future and excitement for renewal, not with a hangover, exhaustion, extreme cold, and overcast dreary skies, which best describes January 1st.
The Autumnal Equinox for the Northern Hemisphere has summer ending this year on September 22nd, but we (Northern Hemispherians in the USA) still mark “Labor Day” as the official end of summer. From the rest of September on, we settle down and give full attention to school, work, all of our current goals and how we might accomplish them.
For many years the US public schools and colleges all started in the first week of September and ended in the last week of May with three months of vacation (Summer Recess). Educational experts changed that model years ago and today American public schools start in early-August and end in mid-June… but we adapt!
IT’S SEPTEMBER, LET THE FALL SEASON (and the “real” new year) BEGIN!
Until later, Jack Atkinson
Founder, Editor, Publisher of ARTS & FOOD Magazine® • Online at <ARTSandFOOD.com>® • Send all inquiries to info@artsandfood.com
(Source: California poster artwork from California Tourism Marketing)
Thanks, Jack! Always interesting…
Thanks Maggie!