Top Story

Caption here (*required)

Small town salsa, enviro-docs, artisan Jello shots, fun punk: warm weather celebrations abound in 2013

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

Save the San Francisco Mime Troupe's summer season!

|
(0)

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.

Read more »

Ron Lanza, queer impressario, dies at 78

|
(23)

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

|
(0)

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

|
(0)

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

|
(0)

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.

Read more »

Things that make you go hmmm: new movies!

|
(0)

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.

Read more »

Dealing with the faux cabs

|
(91)

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

|
(52)

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

|
(6)

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. 

Read more »

ABC shows more concern about expanding police video surveillance than Mayor Lee

|
(15)

The SFPD has quietly expanded its reach and authority to obtain video surveillance from in and around bars, clubs, and markets through a condition it has begun recommending on new liquor licenses, as I reported in today's issue, effectively bypassing controls on city-operated surveillance cameras established through extensive public hearings in 2005.Read more »

San Francisco has a lot of money tied up in fossil fuels

|
(31)

The San Francisco Employees Retirement System has more than $113 million in holdings in Exxon Mobil. It’s a lucrative investment in a dirty business. On March 29, Exxon’s Pegasus Pipeline ruptured, spilling as much as 7,000 barrels of oil in a toxic slick that coated a residential Arkansas neighborhood and prompted the evacuation of 21 homes.Read more »

John Waters would love tonight's Que(e)ry party -- and more, from your week in sexy events

|
(0)

We've all seen the John Waters quote: “If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!” Baltimore's favorite trashy son, however, neglects to specify how to express your affection for their bok collection, and for good reason. The literary world supports a plethora of sexual proclivities -- all are welcome to find their sensual muses within the extraordinary range of love found in books.Read more »

The Performant: Band(s) of a thousand faces

|
(0)

Borts Minorts/Fuxedos/Polkacide fux shit up at Bottom of the Hill

It had been awhile since I’d stood in slightly gape-mouthed awe before the glorious mania of Borts Minorts, who last played the Bay Area some five years ago, the jerk, depriving me of my Dadatastic fun fix for far too long. Read more »

British singer Jessie Ware on summer plans, being herself on stage, and flowers in SF

|
(0)

I first heard Jessie Ware’s “If You’re Never Gonna Move” on the road from the East Coast. After that, the song averaged about five plays per state. Ware’s understated and soulful dance pop has the rare ability to adapt to any situation. It eases the tension in a car full of two people with almost irreconcilable taste in music; it works equally well as the soundtrack to a lazy afternoon, and a night out. And it feels good.

The formula, which has earned her recognition in her native UK, is gaining a following in the US. Though the breakthrough album Devotion won’t be released stateside until April 16, many of her concerts, including Thursday’s at the Independent, have sold out to audiences that sing along with every word. (Not to worry, she also has an in-store at Amoeba that day.) Read more »

Main Street's sex club: Eros celebrates 21 years in business

|
(36)

A few things that you may not know about Eros, the 21-year old sex club with the unassuming, rainbow-flagged façade that stands across the street from the Castro Safeway strip mall. One: it is hosting an art show on Thu/11 open to all to attend (perfect for female-identified folks interested in checking out the space, or at least the front room). Two, boundary-breaking trans-cis male porn is made there. Read more »