A FEW HOURS after the bombs exploded in London July 7, Tim Kingston, who regularly writes for us and just finished a temporary stint as a staff reporter, was on the phone trying to reach friends in the city where he grew up. Everyone he knew was fine – but they were also angry, and not just at the bombers.

"What the hell did you expect if you are going to go bombing and invading people?" one English friend told Kingston.

There aren't many publications in the United States talking about it, but the British press has been willing to float out the question: By invading Iraq and creating a giant new recruitment poster for Islamic fundamentalists, were President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair at least partially to blame for this attack?

As Kingston notes in his piece, which you can read at sfbg.com, "I have a sinking feeling, hoping it's not a case of 'Here we go again.' "

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There's happier news at home. "Bay Area Now 4," Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' triennial survey of the city's art scene, opens July 16. As senior editor for arts and entertainment Kimberly Chun notes:

" 'Bay Area Now 4 is particularly interesting in the wake of the rise of the Mission School (which we covered about three years ago to the date in Glen Helfand's 'The Mission School: San Francisco's Street Artists Deliver Their Neighborhood to the Art World,' 7/11/02) and the growing influence of last year's "Beautiful Losers" exhibit at the museum. With the exhibit, cocurators René de Guzman and Berin Golonu hope to gauge 'the temperature of the regional art scene by generating artistic activity and a dialogue about the Bay Area's significance as a cultural region,' while providing a launch pad for local visual artists."

This year Helfand looks at notions of community and how they manifest as a major curatorial theme at this year's YBC show. Chun looks at our cover subjects, SF "photo gang" Hamburger Eyes, and their particularly stark, vivid, and undeniably powerful brand of photojournalism, compiled in their captionless zine turned journal, Hamburger Eyes. Johnny Ray Huston descends into the mind of Edward Mathew Taylor, the alter-ego of Marina artist Frederick Loomis, to check out an elaborate cosmology that imagines a year when computers will claim control of the world. And if that's not enough, we also pick the standouts at the show.

Tim Redmond