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Up against intense market pressure, longtime residents and community projects fade from SF

This Week's Paper

Evictions sweep the city. Plus, Björk, Black Watch, a guide to summer's best fairs and festivals, Southside Spirit House, community basketball, and more. Articles Online | Digital Edition

From the Blogs

An art benefit -- for the artists

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All sorts of political campaigns and causes raise money by asking artists to donate work that can be auctioned off. It's not often that the artists themselves get the benefits.

So Matt Gonzalez -- former supervisor, longtime criminal defense lawyer, and big fan of local arts -- is putting together a different type of fund-raiser. It's an art auction -- to benefit the artists.Read more »

Faux cabs: A tourism industry perspective

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I got a fascinating letter from a person who's worked in the tourism business in San Francisco for many years, and he's very worried about the impact of the faux cabs on the city's biggest industry. Here's his note:Read more »

Proposal would halt condo conversions for ten years

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San Francisco Supervisors Norman Yee, Jane Kim and Board President David Chiu gathered with a cluster of tenant advocates at City Hall April 15 to unveil a proposal billed as a more equitable alternative to a highly controversial condominium conversion legislation that’s fueled a months-long battle over affordable housing. Read more »

Treasure Island: Is this the end?

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So Mayor Lee goes to China with plans to celebrate the signing of a deal that would bring $1.7 billion in Chinese investment into the lagging Treasure Island redevelopment project, and instead the whole thing falls apart. Not good for the cross-Bay rivalry: Gov. Brown, a former mayor of Oakland, landed $1.8 billion in Chinese money for his city's big project, while Lee lost out.Read more »

Jessie Ware eats pizza at Little Star, connects with her fans at the Independent

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Last Thursday, when the lights came up on the stage at the Independent, they revealed a woman who was relishing the reverential shouts of the sold-out crowd. With a dramatic bun on top of her head, large hoop earrings, and tall heels, Jessie Ware appeared to embody the fully realized pop star that the world is starting to recognize in her.

Throughout the night, though, it became clear that what makes Ware so compelling isn’t the idolizing distance of pop-stardom, but its opposite. Between each song, she charmed the audience with candid and often self-deprecating banter. To a loud response of cheers and clapping, she spoke of her boyfriend who had joined her on tour and enjoyed planting himself in the audience to gauge its mood. “If someone comes up to you being a bit pervy, it’s just ‘cause he’s really proud of me,” she said, then laughed along with the crowd. Read more »

When conservatives love Leno

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State Sen. Mark Leno is used to facing opposition. His efforts to regulate chemicals, end gender discrimination in insurance, and force cell-phone makers to come clean about radiation levels put him up against some of the most powerful interest groups in the state. Read more »

Save the San Francisco Mime Troupe's summer season!

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All the world may be a stage, but as San Francisco Mime Troupe fans are finding out, it’s not a free one.

Even as we gleefully contemplate a Fleet Week sans Blue Angels, truly the silver lining of sequestration, the news that the San Francisco Mime Troupe is facing an immediate financial crisis reminds us of its downsides as well. After several anticipated grants failed to be awarded to the acclaimed theatrical collective, including one from longtime funders the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mime Troupe announced that it needs to raise $40,000 by the end of April in order to mount its summer tour of a show about natural resources and climate change tentatively entitled Oil and Water.

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Ron Lanza, queer impressario, dies at 78

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Ron Lanza, a pioneer in San Francisco’s gay rights movement and an impressario who promoted queer arts through the worst of the AIDS crisis, has died after a long battle with colon cancer. He was 78.Read more »

Neighborhood sounds: MAPPS takes over the Mission

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Photos by Bowerbird Photography

It's fun to imagine what it would be like to have lived during the Beatnik era, an era full of art salons and improvised performance. An evening walking around the for the Mission Arts and Performance Project (MAPP) with friends seems like close fit to those artistic days, because you never really know what you'll see when you roll up to one of the many venues along the MAPP's guide to the Mission. Read more »

Smell that: Wildflower trains take you away all this month

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If one-too-many overcrowded Muni rides have left you aching for a more pleasurable mass transit experience, the Western Railway Museum has an option that smells less of body odor and more of spring flowers for you this weekend: the 12th year of its April spring wildflower train rides, which take passengers back to the early 1900s on an hour-long, 10-mile trip around the Montezuma Hills, a mere hour’s drive out of town.  Read more »

Words, words, words permeate a couple of unconventional theater options this weekend

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The scattered letters piled on the floor are alternately a lover, a tormentor, a terrible reminder, a set of mysterious directives, and a bed for restless dreaming for Ophelia — or rather, one of her three incarnations — as French company Carte Blanche presents its roaming, site-specific riff on Shakespeare’s sad heroine, with inspiration drawn from Arthur Rimbaud’s famous elegy.
 
But despite all those missives from a certain gloomy prince, the piece makes much use of silence too, as the audience mills around the Firehouse at Fort Mason Center, watching the agitated actions of three young heroines in various rooms before being led outside for a journey to other environs.

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Things that make you go hmmm: new movies!

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Better order your popcorn with a side of open-mindedness this week, what with To the Wonder (meh) and Upstream Color (woo!) launching themselves at audiences. Less experimental types can settle for ensemble drama Disconnect or Scary Movie 5, the latest in the pop-culture parody series.

Read on for the rest of this week's new films, including the latest from Danny Boyle and Robert Redford, plus a perfectly-timed-to-maximize-on-the-start-of-baseball-season Jackie Robinson biopic.

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Dealing with the faux cabs

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Lots of comments on my article outlining the problems with the fake cabs that are riding around town without medallions or proper screening. The main complaint the trolls have appears to be their dislike of cab drivers and the difficulty of getting a cab in some places and at certain times. I've never had a bad experience with an SF cab driver in 30 years of living here and taking cabs, but I'm sure there are others who have; no industry is perfect.Read more »

Checks from mayor's mysterious breakfast companions mysteriously absent

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In less than three months, custom made super yachts will zip around the San Francisco Bay in the ultimate competition for the prized America’s Cup. But San Francisco could wind up spending millions more than originally expected to host this prestigious sailing regatta.Read more »

Internet cats, in their own words: Colonel Meow

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I got -- and am continuing to get -- in quite a few conversations with loved ones and people I get stuck chatting with at parties, about favorite Internet cats. Such has been the all-consuming process that is this week's "Cat Pack" cover story. And shocked, I am shocked each time someone is ignorant of Colonel Meow's charms. The luxuriously eyebrowed black-and-gray Persian longhair from Washington State, and his owner Anne Marie Avey's megalomaniac prose have entered our cultural vernacular. 

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