Rolling Stone named Kristin Hersh’s Rat Girl as one of the 10 best rock memoirs ever written, and the Noise Pop stalwart and founder of Throwing Muses and 50 Foot Wave is coming to Green Apple Books to support her follow-up, a eulogy of sorts for her friend, Vic Chesnutt. A disabled singer-songwriter whose confinement to a wheelchair and lack of digital dexterity left him unable to play more than the simplest chords, Chesnutt certainly cuts a tragic figure, but Hersh’s Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt proves that the musician’s-musician status his work received was more than empty condescension. This look at their decade-long friendship goes far deeper than diagnosing the faults of a complex personality, and Hersh’s conversation with S.F. writer and editor Anisse Gross is bound to tease out all the poignant moments — and probably a fair amount of insults, too.More
ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948) is playing at the Paramount Theater! Purchase advance
tickets here or enter to win a pair of tickets here. Tickets also available at the Paramount Box Office on movie night.
Jeepers! The creepers are after Bud and Lou! The nitwits deliver two crates containing the remains
of Dracula (Bela Lugosi) and Frankenstein's monster (Glenn Strange) to a house of horrors, and sure enough, slapstick shenanigans ensue. Not only
are Dracula and Frankenstein's monster unleashed, but the Wolfman (Lon Chaney Jr.) is on the prowl as well!More
December is almost over - the New Year is coming up and everyone is busy drying off from the rain or holiday shopping. Let's take a look at what's happened this month.
When we were young, packs of unsupervised children roamed the city streets like motherless beasts on Halloween. We got bus transfers and gathered so many pounds of Fun-Size Milky Ways, and we had to stuff sacks in the bushes for future retrieval. These days, most kids are relegated to highly supervised trick-or-treat parties held in schoolyards and churchyards — in Southern California, they’re actually held in parking lots where vetted hosts arrange their cars with trunks full of candy — making our banshee heart wail. If trick-or-treating must be sequestered and scrutinized, we pray a SuperNatural Halloween Party will always be held within the darkened halls of the natural history museum, because even we can imagine the thrill of trick-or-treating between live shark tanks and taxidermied lions. For the smaller kids, there’s face painting (which never gets old) and magic shows, and prizes for the best guess on the weight of the giant pumpkin before it is carved up into a fiendish face. Proceeds benefit the Academy’s education programs.More
In 2010, Iraqi American artist Wafaa Bilal, an associate arts professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, received 105,000 tattoos, one dot for every fatality associated with Operation Iraqi Freedom. During the same year, New York-born artist Mariam Ghani hired Afghani-Americans who had worked as translators for the U.S. military to review, on video, reports about conditions in U.S. military prisons back in Afghanistan. Resistance art has been a part of our global cultural landscape for as long as there have been powers to resist. But, to view it, listen to it, and consider it in real time, and without the mollifying balm of a faded past, is a challenging endeavor. As the artistic response by Muslims, South Asians, and Arab Americans continues to grow, from hip-hop to fine art, in the face of an unending War on Terror, Ronak K. Kapadia — cultural theorist and assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies — offers to serve as guide. Friday, he shares examples, context, and opinion from his upcoming book Shadow Atlas: US Global Counterinsurgencies and the Sensorial Life of Empire.More
Illustration by Yuko Shimizu POP-POP-POP-POP-POP. There were glass shards in the street, murdered family members in the car, sirens in the distance growing louder. The car with the gunman peeled off. Twenty minutes earlier, that car was parked outside…
Illustration by Graham Smith The MS-13 gangster leans toward a Plexiglas window in the Glenn E. Dyer Jail in downtown Oakland, speaking loudly over the desperate sounds of a man roaring and beating on the wall a few rooms…
Last October, federal and local officials including U.S. Attorney Joseph Russoniello and then–San Francisco Police Chief Heather Fong summoned the press to boast about how interagency cooperation had netted a sweeping indictment against 29 members of the violent MS-13 gang.…
According to the SFPD, neighborhood tips have contributed to the busts of marijuana grow houses in the Sunset. How do you know you're living next to a growing house? You Yelped it. Telephone poles covered in resin …