Raise your hand if performance comedy stylist Sandra Bernhard is an ever-present entity in your cultural firmament. Is she the voice of your internal monolouge when you're feeling powerful? 

Bernhard's mark on popular culture is everywhere. Remember her cameo in Truth or Dare, in which she encourages Madonna to go ahead and meet that young Spanish actor Antonio Banderas? I like to imagine that Bernhard (“Sandra”) and I have it like that -- I can fly her out to my hotel room when I'm just sooo bored of hanging out with the back-up dancers. I want her always sitting on a stool with that wall of '90s hair, gold hoops, knotted silk button-down, a la 1990’s Without You I’m Nothing. May she drawl about tambourines and poppers 4eva. Read more »

I thought that the booming voice yelling across the backyard of Anderson Valley Brewing Company, hosts of the vaunted Boonville Beer Festival, would be bearing tidings of “shut the hell up and go to sleep.” After all, it was 1am and many of the pros camping in the shady glen designated for brewers had a long day of pouring stouts and ambers in the hot sun ahead at the May 4 festival. 

But I had misjudged the staying power of bearded and hop-obsessed hippiefolk. Read more »

Somehow in the shiny blitz of new restaurants made out of stainless steel, you may have missed the arrival of the Eric Quezada Center for Politics and Culture right in the thick of the Mission. That'd be a shame -- the space where the Abandoned Planet bookstore stood until 2010 now hosts some of the most vibrant alternative events in the country. Last time I made it through, it was for a poster show of screenprinted calls for immigration justice. A theater group comprised of Filipina caretakers performed, and in the back you could buy homemade butterfly cookies and sangria.

Speaking of the Quezada Center, if you're a Latino photographer, you're in luck -- a local non-profit wants to put your snaps up the gallery walls.   Read more »

I keep my iPhone slow with all the street art shots I forever shoot and store with it. Where will these photos go, this endless documentation of my surrounds? Sure, every once in awhile they'll pour out into a best-of compilation for the paper, but most of the time they're just there, staring me in the face, daring me to trap my friends into a mandatory slideshow session. "Dude, you gotta check this one out! It's... oh, um, it's like in that one alley behind that fancy hat factory?"Read more »