The Performant: How Grinches save Christmas

12.28.12 - 6:49 am | Nicole Gluckstern |

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Jeff Garrett in “Scrooge, the Haunting of Ebenezer.” Photo by Peter Liu

Will Franken's holiday show. Photo by Nicole Gluckstern

Jeff Garrett and Will Franken overcome holiday saccharine.

Is that a collective sigh of relief in the air as another frenzied holiday season winds down to its usual end and whatever apocalypse was scheduled to go down seems to have spared at least our physical reality?

As we drift back into the routines of our regularly scheduled lives, the brief illumination of whatever lessons we were meant to be learning on the eve of our potential destruction and the supposed birthday of our salvation, flickers out without so much as a whimper. It’s a bit of a stretch anyhow, to weight a single stretch of calendar with so much cosmic significance, yet we do it year after year, grasping superstitiously at the shimmering notion of redemption, the hidden catalyst underlying our frantic excess.

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Appetite: More tantalizing sweet spots

12.26.12 - 3:14 pm | Virginia Miller |

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Last week, I indulged my sweet side with a romp through several notable new candy stores and dessert offerings -- here are several more to dive into:

While we await the menu launch at the new Dandelion Chocolate factory (read more in my recent chocolate article), the beautiful space sells Dandelion's exquisite bars, and boxes of collaborative chocolates with two other local greats, Feve Artisan Chocolatier and Kika's Treats.

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On the Om Front: Where to breathe deeply this holiday season

12.20.12 - 2:26 pm | Karen Macklin |

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Do you feel like the world is always about to end? I do. Maybe it’s because we’ve been in a recession almost my entire adulthood. Or because I still remember everyone stocking up on toilet paper and batteries for Y2K. Or because it seems these days like there is always a natural disaster happening somewhere in the world, and if a hurricane or tornado or tsunami isn’t tearing apart a city or a village, some crazy dude is shooting people or devising a shoe bomb or proselytizing that everyone is going to hell in a hand basket lest we give up our immoral ways and fast.

But I have hope. Because dark cannot exist without light. And often, the darker things get, the lighter they’re bound to become. Read more »

The Performant: Unsilent is the night

12.20.12 - 1:02 pm | Nicole Gluckstern |

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Ring the bells

Observant or not, there’s no escaping the Festivus Chrismakwanzakah season, and while you might be grinching it alone with the holiday spirit best known as Kentucky Bourbon, you can’t entirely avoid the pervasive influence that is holiday music. Music, after all, is one of our best tools for communicating intangibles such as emotion, faith, and belief in supernatural beings, and there’s hardly anyone sentient who could fail to be momentarily moved by a rendition of the haunting “Coventry Carol” or Handel’s “Messiah”. Read more »

Golden Gate Park magic mushroom finally classified, just in time for high season

12.18.12 - 3:59 pm | Caitlin Donohue |

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Hurray for science! Thanks to it and people who believe in it, a small tan spore that has been sprouting happily for Bay Area trippers for decades has a name: Psilocybe allenii. Our friends at the Psychedelic Society of San Francisco tipped us off to the fact that PSSF lecturer and mycologist Alan Rockefeller had helped pen a definitional paper that introduced the little guys. Rockefeller will be leading a Society mushroom hunt -- open to all comers -- in Golden Gate Park on Thu/20. He told us hippies have been hunting Psilocybe allenii in the park for ages, previously using its informal name Psilocybe cyanofriscosa, which sounds suspiciously close to "San Francisco" to us.

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San Francisco Film Critics Circle's 2012 awards!

12.18.12 - 3:39 pm | Cheryl Eddy |

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Oscars and Golden Globes are one breed of animal — critics' groups are another beast entirely (hopefully, of the more free-thinking, out-of-the-box type). At the lively annual meeting of the San Francisco Film Critics' Circle Sun/16, several races came down to just one or two votes' difference. But we muddled through (there was wine, there were cookies) and came up with a slate of winners I'm proud to report here.

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Film

Live Shots: SantaCon sleighed SF

12.17.12 - 11:36 am | Ariel Soto-Suver |

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SantaCon 2012. Photo by Bowerbird Photography

Photos by Bowerbird Photography

A city wide pub crawl wearing santa costumes. How could San Francisco not be thrilled for this annual event, the city where everyone loves to dress up and drink! (Well, OK, some of us were terrified of the more tipsier St. Nicholas cohorts, who may have gotten a little too jolly. But still.)

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On the Om Front: MC Yogi's Gandhi connection

12.14.12 - 9:00 am | Karen Macklin |

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You know yoga has arrived when yoga teachers are up at the mic giving a TED talk.

This past October, the Bay Area’s very own yoga teacher-rapper-extraordinaire MC Yogi took the stage at Madrone Studios in the Mission to address a room full of movers, thinkers, and shakers as part of an event called TED X City 2.0. The event was created to bring together bright, urban visionaries to speak about how to create more sustainable cities. I caught up with the MC Yogi this week to ask him about the experience, and how yoga teaches us in the Bay Area to be more sustainable.

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Heroic shorties return! "The Hobbit" and more new movies

12.13.12 - 6:33 pm | Cheryl Eddy |

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One more week until Hollywood unleashes a mighty flood of new films, in honor of noted multiplex fan Baby Jesus. This week's only big release is Peter Jackson's return to Middle-earth, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which at two hours and 46 minutes is definitely a pee-before, bring-snacks-to-eat-during experience. My review below the jump, along with takes on the Alan Cumming showcase Any Day Now and Israeli coming-of-age drama The Matchmaker.

Also worth the popcorn calories: documentarian Ken Burns' provocative look at one of New York City's most infamous crimes, The Central Park Five; less so is the FDR dramedy Hyde Park on Hudson, which does star Bill Murray, so at least it has that goin' for it, which is nice. I review both films here. Read more »

Film

The Performant: Poetry in motion

12.13.12 - 10:42 am | Nicole Gluckstern |

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From Performers Under Stress "You Need to Read Poetry"

From Ragged Wing Ensemble's "Fierce Plays"

"You Need to Read Poetry" and "Ragged Wing" take flight

Against the back curtain of the stage, empty save a couple of small platforms, a mysterious tree, represented by a rainbow of colored scarves, stretched its silken boughs. Cut to the “great before,” when humans were still a figment of the future, and Mol’-luk (Liz Wand), a brooding, powerful condor, sat perched on a rock, little suspecting that the “mountain” is pregnant with his peregrine falcon son, Wek Wek (Juliana Lustenader), whose dramatic birth by fire was further facilitated by a chorus of rattlesnakes (select members of the oddience armed with noisemakers).

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