At first, we were frightened. My god, they're taking our kombucha! But though distribution of our liquid love has drastically slowed, there's one good thing about the 'bucha alcohol labeling debacle: it's been great for local businesses. That's because while bigger companies are halting production, the small scale of the Bay Area's local kombucha operations are allowing them to dodge the labeling problems of national chains. Read more »

I watch as Theresa Alvarez painstakingly turns four year old Rolando Steinway-Raybon into a tiger with the palette of face-paints sitting in front of the Mission Beacon neighborhood organizer. Next to them, speakers bumped a hip hop song. Down the block of Bartlett Street where they sat, community members were buying and selling bags of salad greens and edible flowers, white peaches, homemade soaps, and pupusas that came with salad and salsa for the princely sum of $2. A lot going on at the first Mission Community Market, which Alvarez takes as a good sign.

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One thing I learned yesterday about the artist in residence program at the Recology dump; Sirron Norris and other alums were not wading through the mountains of lightly used diapers and rotting carrots to cull the materials for the flights of foraged fancy they produce in the program, a 20-year retrospective of which opens today, Wed/21, at Intersection 5M. No no, they pick through the goods turned up by the city's curb-side and drop-off recycling program, which you think would be a little cleaner. I mean, look at the art they made from it. But you'd be surprised...  Read more »

There are some who say that the Bay Area is the birthplace of modern fire arts. Regardless of the pedigree involved, we look damn good getting our sparks off.Read more »

“Kelly, parents really need to listen up on this one,” says the somewhat stiff-jawed newscaster on News 9 Oklahoma City. Oh good, I hadn't heard another blatant attempt to scare the bejeesus out of parents in a while. They're talking about “I doser” videos, videos that cause Mountain Dew swilling adolescent nerds to approximate what they think drunk people do. But wait... free drugs? Can grownups play? Ever attentive to our readers' needs, I have sifted through the rubble. Conclusions to follow.

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This from Michael Sturtz, creative director of the berth of the Bay's fire community, the Crucible. This weekend (Fri/16 and Sat/17), HEAT: the Fire Cabaret, rises up like a sultry phoenix, an onstage imagining of a flame speakeasy during fire Prohibition at whose “height, lighters and matches were confiscated.” Involved in the production: Read more »

Sometimes a great yoga class can be a relief. Like, that kind of relief. A pelvic floor loosening, an unwinding, a drowsily loving feeling that usually comes after a pleasurable close (naked) encounter with a certain sexy someone. But I little imagined that American yoga got its limber legs in an elite tantric love nest -- that is, until I read Robert Love's The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America. The book tells the story of the revered and reviled Dr. Pierre Bernard, who actually started the debaucherous deep breathing in that Sodom of the early 20th century – the city by the Bay. Read more »