I knew I was in the right place. I could smell it before I even got in the building. The brazenly pungent aroma emanated out the glass doors, down the yellow walls of the entrance corridor, and out into the San Francisco Art Institute’s scenic courtyard.

It was a smell both foreign and familiar. The fragrant notes of beef stew, rich with clove, onion and rosemary, coupled with the sour musty smell of cognac, wine, and time.

Inside, behind a large black curtain, a dark gooey brew bubbled from within a deep silver pot atop a gas stove, while various vegetables and spices rested on a butcher’s block next to it.

However, the cook, Jean-Baptiste Ganne, is not a chef. And he won’t be feeding his creation to any group of hungry foodies. Instead the French photographer and artist hopes to speak to something different. For this exhibit, titled “The Cookist, a very informal seminar on the question of work,” Ganne prepares a traditional French dish called la daube, cooked over a three-day period solely to produce a smell. There is nothing to eat, and little to see, making the exhibit particularly unique, as the fragrance can be experienced only by those present at the moment.

Ah, the ecstacy of pomo French theorizing: it feels like sandpaper, tastes like mint, and never leaves the cold bathroom. Sometimes it's a bloody butterfly. Other times it's a tongue on vinyl. And always the future conditional pluperfect leotard. Ce ca?

And yet, the gulf may exist.

Fuck Baudrillard. Fuck Foucault. I'm going home to lie under the covers with a flashlight and review my hand-stitched limited edition of XEROX now. I hated the Matrix. Or did I only think I hated it?

No. I did hate it.

Divine intern Sam Devine gets soapy:

Laundry day will be different today. I’m using a new hippy product from Santa Cruz to clean my clothes: Soap Nuts, the soap that grows on trees.

Soap grows on trees?

Yeah, turns out Soap Nuts are the dried fruit of the Chinese Soapberry tree. According to a letter from Maggie’s Pure Land Products, people have been using the cracked apricot looking little bastards to wash clothes for thousands of years.

Now, what I could really use are some laundry quarters grown on trees, but I’ll settle for soap.

I know this should technically go in the Noise blog, but I didn't want it to get lost in our upcoming blizzard of SXSW coverage, so here goes .... I LOVE YUNDI LI!

Last night at Davies Hall, the SF Symphony accompanied this teen sensation in Franz Liszt's Piano Concerto #1, and it was a storm of fiery pyrotechnics -- fingers flew, strings broke, spirits soared, and everything sounded so beautifully complicated and romantic that, at the finale, the audience sprang to its feet and cheered (if you haven't noticed, standing ovations in this town are very few and far between -- too showy, maybe?)

Associate conductor James Gaffigan cut an archetypal "wild romantic conductor with wild romantic hair" figure (guess MTT was in Miami for the Winter Music Conference, heh), driving the symphony to ecstatic heights.

40-Year-Old Virgin:

55-Year-Old Money-Guru Lesbian Virgin:

Last Wednesday we unleashed the first issue of our new quarterly glossy supplement SCENE: The Guardian Guide to Nightlife and Glamour to thunderous approval and only a few (disappointing) howls of protest. I want more protest dammit! Where's freakin' Fox News when you want 'em! My nails are too long to dial the right-wing media up. Lord, I need a special dialing wand .

With fashion and photography contributed by House of Herrera and art direction by Mirissa Neff, SCENE took on Nightlife During Wartime. Go ahead and read my intro essay Emergence exits: Getting crazy in a time of crisis -- if you dare.

More pics and articles after the jump!

Below are additional photos from the paper version of our story on 84-year-old Leola King who owned a string of popular businesses in the Fillmore District before they each succumbed to a nationwide urban redevelopment push that began in the 1940s. These images document King's Blue Mirror club, which she opened in 1953 at 935 Fillmore St.

By Molly Freedenberg

The jury’s out on what exactly causes a hangover. Some say it’s dehydration. Others claim there’s something in the alcohol itself that poisons you. I even had a nutritionist once tell me that it’s essentially a large-scale sugar crash (since alcohol is a sugar, it’s like eating nothing but Snickers bars for seven hours and then wondering why you feel like crap the next morning). I don’t know about any of those, but I’d like to add something to the list: our bi-annual FEAST supplement. That’s right. I’ve been editing this baby (to be published April 4) for almost a month now, and doing my job well (which translates into: eating and drinking as much as possible at as many places as possible) has meant waking up half that month’s mornings with a dry throat, fuzzy brain, rumbly tummy, and insatiable hunger for sleep.

After discussing this phenomenon with my coworkers, who I roped in to doing my “research” with me, I decided it was time to do a Guardian-wide experiment. In a building full of people who know how to play as hard as they work, someone must have the perfect hangover cure. And even if no one did, with drinkers this devoted, surely we’d have plenty of opportunities to test the snake oils we’ve all heard about but never tried (Almonds before drinking? Primrose oil? Lemon juice in black coffee? And strangest of all: running? Are you kidding me?).

And so.

Intern Sam Devine slips between the photocopied covers ....

Down by Union Square tourists clog the streets like automatons bent on material satisfaction. You can almost hear their thoughts humming beneath their skulls like the cable car cord beneath the road.

“mmm…Neiman Marcus…bzzit…shoe sale… must…buy…”

What you can hear – all too often – are the guys who ask for change:
“Spare change?” “Help the homeless, tonight!” “Street Sheet, Street Sheet.” “Would you like to buy a comic book, sir?”

Wait: what?

Thom creates beautiful art, as honest and brutal as the life he leads. You can find him pushing his photocopied mini-comics next to the Street Sheet sellers on O’Farrell and Powell. If he sounds familiar, you probably used to see him at 16th and Valencia hawking “Mission Mini-Comix.”

I picked up three of his little books the other week on St. Patty’s day: Burritos are the Best, The Sun Also Sets, and Tha Funky Worm – “You know,” said Thom in his West Coast stoner drawl, surrounded by the green, white and orange mayhem of the afternoon. “Like that Ohio Players cut.”