Bostonians Tyler Balliet and Morgan First love wine. Drinking it, talking about it, introducing other people to it. But wine, unfortunately, is often perceived to have an attitude, a culture of snottiness and pretension that puts people off before they even get close to a wine glass. Why swirl it? What's with that obnoxious sucking sound? What the hell is the deal with spitting it out? What about the
confusing vocabulary and snooty descriptors? When did wine become "sassy" or "understated", instead of "delicious"?
[more inside]
posted by MissySedai
on Apr 30, 2013 -
127 comments
San Francisco in 1955 in color "Shot by filmmaker Tullio Pellgrini, the 20-minute movie gives an up-close-and-personal tour of the city from Pellgrini's automobile. His narration is charmingly earnest in a way that's promotional of the city's virtues while never stepping over into being particularly phony or cloying."
posted by Long Way To Go
on Apr 20, 2013 -
34 comments
Upon proudly celebrating 10 years of the show's rich history at the forefront of Drum & Bass, Breaks, Dubstep, Grime, Broken Beat, 2Step and other emerging genres, the hosts of Future Breaks are satisfied that the time has now come to pass the torch and retire the weekly broadcasts of the program.
The final broadcast of Future Breaks FM! will air live January 26, 2008 at 4pm PST. Our online presence at www.futurebreaks.fm will be preserved and we may continue to podcast select archival programs from the "vaults" as well as other surprises.
Our small, non-profit radio show was founded in January 1998 by Ms. E, dj PUSH and Arc Angel Gabe Real as an outlet for underground 21st Century electronic dance music featuring weekly, live in-studio mixing by turntable DJs.
Future Breaks FM was a weekly electronic music show with a decidedly Jungle/DnB flavor that ran on
KUSF, the University of San Francisco's radio station (which
went off the air 2011) from 1998-2008. Forty-nine episodes, up to the last show on 26 Jan 2008,
are still available on the podcast archive.
posted by changoperezoso
on Apr 14, 2013 -
7 comments
The Bacon-Wrapped Economy , or how the rise of a new elite of wealthy, predominantly twentysomething, software engineers and startup founders is changing the San Francisco Bay Area's economy and culture.
[more inside]
posted by acb
on Mar 24, 2013 -
134 comments
Click that 'hood! is a simple game which tasks you to locate neighborhoods in one of six cities: Chicago, IL; Lexington, KY; Louisville, KY; Oakland, CA; San Francisco, CA; and Seattle, WA. An easy game gives you 20 neighborhoods: A hard game gives you the entire city.
posted by shakespeherian
on Feb 4, 2013 -
43 comments
Rebecca Solnit on how Silicon Valley corporations are transforming San Francisco: I weathered the dot-com boom of the late 1990s as an observer, but I sold my apartment to a Google engineer last year and ventured out into both the rental market (for the short term) and home buying market (for the long term) with confidence that my long standing in this city and respectable finances would open a path. That confidence got crushed fast. It turned out that the competition for any apartment in San Francisco was so intense that you had to respond to the listings – all on San Francisco-based Craigslist of course, the classifieds website that whittled away newspaper ad revenue nationally – within a few hours of their posting to receive a reply from the landlord or agency. The listings for both rentals and homes for sale often mentioned their proximity to the Google or Apple bus stops. [more inside]
posted by liketitanic
on Jan 31, 2013 -
143 comments
First the Bubble. Then the Short. Now the Long.
Some neighborhoods in Oakland are as devastated as any of the worst hit regions across America — Atlanta, Las Vegas, Phoenix. Now the morphing of the housing bust and foreclosure epidemic into a lucrative multi-billion dollar opportunity for major investors is also uncannily centered upon Oakland and the greater Bay Area, where companies flush with hedge fund cash are buying up homes by the thousands.
The entire sweep of the US housing bubble, financial crisis, and foreclosure wave can therefore be told by looking at persons and companies with intimate links to Oakland and the Bay Area. What follows is one account.
posted by the man of twists and turns
on Dec 11, 2012 -
41 comments
Anyone who has spent any time at all on the Western side of San Francisco is familiar with the name
Sutro. Being the 24th mayor of the City was actually one of his smaller and lesser-known accomplishments.
Born in Prussia in 1830, he first made a name for himself with
The Sutro Tunnel, which was used to drain water from underneath the
Comstock Lode, improving working conditions and lowering the mine's operating costs. He sold his interest in the company he founded and left for San Francisco, where
he built himself
a mansion, among other things...
[more inside]
posted by MattMangels
on Dec 9, 2012 -
24 comments
Reuben Reynoso gets paid to
jump on mattresses, day after day, mattress after mattress. The McRoskey Mattress Company in San Francisco has been making mattresses — and having people jump on them — for 112 years, since before the 1906 quake.
[more inside]
posted by Lexica
on Oct 31, 2012 -
10 comments
Suddenly That Summer: It was billed as “the Summer of Love,” a blast of glamour, ecstasy, and Utopianism that drew some 75,000 young people to the San Francisco streets in 1967. Who were the true movers behind the Haight-Ashbury happening that turned America on to a whole new age?
[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns
on Sep 15, 2012 -
48 comments
When is a private space a public space? When it's a
Privately Owned Public Space (POPS). In accordance with the planning codes of some cities, owners or builders of buildings are mandated to provide members of the general public access to spaces which include rooftop gardens, courtyards, and plazas.
[more inside]
posted by larrybob
on Aug 31, 2012 -
23 comments
Bill Brent was the publisher of the zine Black Sheets and the alternative sexuality directory The Black Book and the author of the book How To Make a Zine (
recently republished in a revised edition) as well as a lot of erotica writing. He was very active in the San Francisco Bay Area sexuality, kink, and zine scenes from the early 90s onward. Unfortunately, he committed suicide in August 2012; Liz Highleyman penned an
in-depth obituary of Bill.
posted by larrybob
on Aug 30, 2012 -
13 comments
A headline rivalling “Batman to leave Gotham”: “
Maupin to leave San Francisco.” But before the
Tales of the City author (
previously) moves to Santa Fe with his husband, you can pick up Armistead Maupin’s
house for a mere $1,198,000. (28 Barbary Lane is not for sale.)
posted by joeclark
on Jul 25, 2012 -
32 comments
Whicker's World was a BBC documentary series that ran from 1959 to 1988, presented by Alan Whicker. In 1967, Whicker traveled to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco to examine the phenomenon of hippies.
Part One introduces us to The Love Generation.
Part Two reveals that The Grateful Dead smoked marijuana.
Part Three features freak-out dance performances and a hippy not on LSD. In
Part Four, a woman in a hammock leads to teeny boppers violating the fuzz and the natural antagonism between the hippies and police.
Part Five is on LSD.
Part Six has many self-indulgent hippies.
[more inside]
posted by twoleftfeet
on Apr 21, 2012 -
25 comments
No one living can say whether the original, ten-hour version of Erich von Stroheim's most famous movie was the epic masterpiece it was touted to be. The 140-minute version is all that remains, and while it's only a quarter of the film it was meant to be, it's still one of the greatest accomplishments (SPOILER) of the silent film era. [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Dec 18, 2011 -
13 comments
Teachings on Right Practice by Shunryu Suzuki, as compiled in
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, read by Peter Coyote:
"Posture", "Breathing",
"Control",
"Mind Weeds",
"The Marrow of Zen",
"Bowing",
"Nothing Special"
posted by Trurl
on Nov 8, 2011 -
16 comments
Meanwhile, 6th and Mission St
is in the center of city. If you've ever walked it, it's like stepping into the another world, not a pleasant one either. On a rainy night, wandering into
Tu Lan, it's famed Vietnamese restaurant, is the closest experience I can recommend to feeling like you're in Blade Runner in America. I work between 5th and 6th on Mission and have wondered and despised how such a place like this came to be. Here's an answer from someone that lives there, which really has me thinking.
posted by straight_razor
on Nov 4, 2011 -
106 comments
"Born
Shigeyoshi Murao in 1926, he was universally known as Shig. His playful demeanor—not to mention his signature beard, Pendleton shirts, Royal Air Force exercise vest, horn-rimmed glasses, and bowler—rendered him unforgettable. But that did not make him easy to know.
Shig, who died in 1999, is largely remembered for an event that occurred on June 3, 1957, when two undercover agents from the San Francisco Police Juvenile Squad showed up at City Lights
to buy a seventy-five-cent book of poetry."
[more inside]
posted by Toekneesan
on Oct 5, 2011 -
10 comments
