LAST SUNDAY NIGHT , among belly dancers and hangers-on, sexperts and stand-ups, director Philip Kaufman told a standing-room-only crowd of more than 300 at the Roxie Cinema that he'd sat in every seat of the theater and hoped his grandson could too. San Francisco Board of Supervisors prez Tom Ammiano was there as well. He called the Roxie "hallowed ground" and promised that city hall would help protect it. Eight hundred San Franciscans pushed bills through the ticket window before, during, and after the Roxie's rent party. Only 350 people could get inside for the show, but numbers 351 through 800 didn't care. They were there to give the theater a $25,000 boost toward remaining in business. Is there any place like the Mission?

The intersection of 16th Street and Valencia is a truly bizarre corner of the world. A presidential limo can drop off a first daughter for a quick bite to eat at the Slanted Door – on the same stretch of sidewalk whose scents of incense, cigarettes, exhaust, ethnic food, bay breeze, and, yes, human excrement international art star Chris Johanson finds inspiring. Johanson, who painted the cover image for Glen Helfand's story "The Mission School" (on page 31) says the neighborhood's like oxygen to him. His work is currently a huge hit at the Whitney Biennial, but as Helfand reports, he seems to feel more comfortable with the scene at used bookstore Adobe, where one can often find Johanson stopping by on his skateboard to check out the artwork alongside the dusty collections of classic beat tomes.

Johanson's emblematic of an ad hoc artistic movement that developed out of the Mission and is growing to surprising acclaim, bringing a new Bay Area aesthetic to the world. Its murals, tags, and underground comics-inspired images can be seen all over the neighborhood, outside Community Thrift, on Clarion Alley, at Lexington and 18th Streets – as well as at the Whitney and UCLA's Hammer Museum. Helfand, who teaches at Mills College and has been an art critic for a decade, lives in the neighborhood, among those murals, and writes that their fusion of outsider aesthetics, political idealism, street attitude, and sincerity matches the Mission's own sharpened edges.

The Bay Guardian lives in the Mission as well and has found much to appreciate in its ungentrifiably gritty city blocks. We're glad the world's discovering it.