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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

Rally and vigils for marriage equality in S.F. this week

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The U.S. Supreme Court will hold back-to-back hearings this week as justices consider Prop 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), setting the stage for historic discussions concerning LGBT civil rights. Tonight, hundreds are expected to gather at Castro and Market streets for a 6:30 p.m. rally, followed by a march to City Hall. Prop 8, a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, passed in California with 52 percent of the vote in November of 2008. Read more »

Oddballs: The best in style from SXSW

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I arrived in Austin smack dab in the middle of the Interactive portion of SXSW, so I got to watch the music folks trickle in first-hand. Every day I'd put on a wig or glitter or some neon and head out, camera in hand, looking for adventure. As the skinny jeans and ripped t-shirts and plaid and beards began to take over from the jeans and button-downs, there were folks like these: colorful, dramatic, friendly, fun, and aesthetically remarkable (sorta like that whole Purple Cow thing marketing people love to talk about...) Read more »

Heads Up: 8 must-see concerts this week

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Sometimes, “world music” takes on an entirely different meaning. This week, the bands and musicians and producers will come from all over the (European) map: there's Grecian psych punk, UK goth pop, Irish deep house and space disco, plus one-half of the first all-female electronic DJ group of Chicago, a KUSF-in-Exile benefit, and a soul clap dance-off.

I'm exhausted just thinking about the travel time it'll take all those acts – Acid Baby Jesus, Veronica Falls, Mano Le Tough, Jonathan Toubin, Texas is the Reason, Colette and DJ Heather, and so many more – to arrive in our foggy city by the bay. Read more »

Internet Cat Video Festival pussyfoots its way to Oakland

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The druggish trip of a heavy Youtube session: you start out looking for that innovative new TED Talk and find yourself, hours later, fixated on a video of sloths in a bucket. How you got there you don’t know.

Sleepy sloths are dangerous to productivity but delve into the endless abyss of cat videos on the web and you might not see the sun for a week. This brings us to our next point of fact: The Internet Cat Video Festival is coming to Oakland May 11, and you can buy tickets starting today. Read more »

Chron workers protest health-care hikes

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About half of the San Francisco Chronicle's editorial staff were packed into their third floor conference room last Wednesday night. And according to people present, it wasn't a news meeting or a press conference.

Angered over years of concessions, buyouts, lost pension, and sacrificed pay raises, the unionized reporters are organizing to fight steep increases in their health-care costs.Read more »

Mr. Marina steals our hearts

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I couldn't get a goddamn one of my friends to go with me to the triumphant return of the Mr. Marina pageant, held for the first time this year at that mecca of San Francisco nightlife Ruby Skye. Fools! Luckily, one of them did volunteer their preppy friend Johnny, who picked me up in a Beamer, bought my drinks for the night, wore a seersucker blazer, and after the pageantry was done brought me to an after-party at Ottimista Enoteca where multiple Mr. Marina runners-up were in attendance.

It was basically the perfect evening and my favorite contestant won the damn thing. As he said in our exclusive dressing room interview shortly before recieving his trophy and ceremonial Mr. Marina sash, "you gotta come hang out with guys like us." Read more »

Does Mayor Lee support Airbnb dodging its $1.8 million tax debt to SF?

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My story in this week's Guardian about how Airbnb appears to be refusing to pay the hotel taxes it owes to the city has gotten a lot of attention. But I'm still getting stonewalled by representatives from the company and Mayor Ed Lee, who apparently refuses to take a public stand against corporate tax evasion, even when it means thousands of San Franciscans could get stuck with an unexpected tax bill.Read more »

The "mystery" of the homeless families

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The Chron's having a hard time figuring out why there are so many more homeless families looking for help.

"It's been difficult to pin down any kind of trend," said Elizabeth Ancker, assistant program director at the nonprofit Compass Connecting Point, the group that manages the waiting list and helped find Bailey a shelter room. "We're really just seeing more of everybody - every demographic, in every situation."

No shit.Read more »

This image explains Deerhoof

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For all those music writers and fans struggling to explain to their friends what experimental SF-born Deerhoof is all about, upbeat vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki made it easy on us earlier this week.

She posted this arresting photo on Deerhoof's Facebook page and explained, “This is visually what deerhoof is about.” Ah, all makes sense now, doesn't it? Read more »

Fine Arts Museums management blasted in colorful anonymous letter

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Ever since the Guardian reported on recent firings and allegations of improper behavior by senior staff at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), we’ve received a great deal of correspondence relating to the museums. Read more »

The human price of Catholic conservatism

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A new book by local historian William Issel explains the key role the Catholic Church played in funding and supporting progressive causes in 20th Century San Francisco, and Randy Shaw's take on it is accurate: For a while, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Church funded a lot of the tenant advocacy and poverty work in this city. The other side of that is a piece of the debate over the new Pope that we're not hearing much.Read more »

Keystone pipeline protesters bound for Pac Heights

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Environmentalists opposing the Keystone XL oil pipeline are gearing up to protest in San Francisco's wealthy Pacific Heights neighborhood on April 3, when President Barack Obama will dine with the city's upper crust for a Democratic Party fundraiser.Read more »

On KPFA, Gavin Newsom ducks the tough ones

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Gavin Newsom sat down for an hour with Brian Edwards-Tiekert of KPFA's Up Front, and the show is remarkable. Brian was a little less harsh than Steven Colbert, who (properly) said the Gavster's new book, Citizenville, needs "a bullshit detector" and that "everything in there could be carved on a stone and put in someone's garden," but he did a great job putting Newsom's book in the context of state and lo Read more »

San Francisco female priest and gay Catholics react to selection of Pope Francis

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Victoria Rue, a female Roman Catholic Priest, leads a small community of renegade Catholic worshipers in San Francisco. Ordained by a trio of female Bishops on a boat on the St. Lawrence Seaway in 2005, she’s part of a growing international movement to dismantle the longstanding ban on female clergy and push the Catholic Church in a more liberal direction. Although Rue was excommunicated shortly after her ordination, she continues to consider herself a Catholic.Read more »

Snap Sounds: Justin Timberlake

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JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE
THE 20/20 EXPERIENCE
(RCA)

It's 10 songs, seven minutes apiece. A quick look at the track-listing to Justin Timberlake's The 20/20 Experience reveals a giant slice of pop ambition; a brazen comeback effort that practically dares the rest of the Grammy-elite to catch up. Read more »