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Snitch

Deanna Johnson testified against a murderer to save her son. But in the projects, truth comes at a price.

By Ashley Harrell

Published: May 21, 2008

It's 7 a.m. on April 16, and Deanna Johnson's alarm clock is going off. She ignores it, and lies so still she could be mistaken for a corpse. She does not open her eyes. She tries not to think...

Feature

Score!!!

Former pro soccer players from Latin America help the Farolito team dominate an amateur league.

By Lauren Smiley

Published: May 14, 2008

On a recent Saturday morning, a crew of aging former professional soccer players from Latin America huddled around Salvador Lopez, who drilled them on the strategy of how their team, El Farolito,...

Feature

Punk Family Values

Meet the Rosenthals: two generations of art stars in one six-story warehouse.

By Jennifer Maerz

Published: May 7, 2008

Carola Anderson carries a pitcher of limeade through her sprawling SOMA home affectionately known as the Complex, the ice cubes bouncing among sprigs of mint. A black beret is cocked atop her...

Feature

Party Crashers 08

Ralph Nader and running mate Matt Gonzalez are looking to make a difference in the upcoming presidential election. Early polling suggests they just might.

By John Geluardi

Published: April 30, 2008

Independent vice-presidential candidate Matt Gonzalez sits attentively in the front row of UC Berkeley's Wheeler Auditorium, waiting for an introduction to 400 political science students who...

Feature

Movie Marathon

The S.F. International Film Fest starts this week and keeps going year-round.

By Meredith Brody

Published: April 23, 2008

There are probably as many ways of approaching the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival — which will unspool (as Variety would have it) from April 24 to May 8 — as there...

Feature

Asia Rising

No flesh in the pan, Argento plays prominently in two featured movies at the Film Fest this year.

By Nathan Lee

Published: April 23, 2008

Audiences at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival might have been less surprised by a glimpse of Asia Argento's anus — the sole body part she has yet to bare onscreen — than by the revelation...

Feature

Best of the Fest

Our critics' recommendations from this year's films.

By J. Hoberman, Frako Loden, Nathan Lee, Michael Fox, Ezra Gale, Ella Taylor, Gregg Rickman, Nick Pinkerton

Published: April 23, 2008

Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov, Russia) Spare yet tactile, a mysterious mixture of lightness and gravity, Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra is founded on contradiction. Musing on war in...

Feature

Q&A; with Medicine for Melancholy Director Barry Jenkins

Local film director gives this town a dose of its own Medicine.

By Michael Fox

Published: April 23, 2008

Barry Jenkins' terrific debut feature, Medicine for Melancholy , is an intimate and sociologically astute study of a young African-American couple spending a day together kicking around San...

Feature

Glass, Jazz, and Black Francis

Music takes the stage at the Film Fest.

By Ezra Gale

Published: April 23, 2008

That was an unusual one, because we were really equals," composer Philip Glass says of his collaboration with director Godfrey Reggio on the landmark 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi. "Normally it's not...

Feature

An Inconvenient Plant

One of the world's rarest plants grows in the Presidio. Plans are under way to save it — and ax thousands of trees in the process.

By Joe Eskenazi

Published: April 16, 2008

A beer bottle cap sails off the porch and glides toward Baker Beach far below. Videogame music and howls of trash talk waft downward, along with the odor of kerosene-doused charcoal briquettes....

Feature

Whistleblower

By most accounts, David Kessler's four years as UCSF's medical school dean were a rip-roaring success. So why was he fired?

By Ron Russell

Published: April 9, 2008

In a cafe near his Pacific Heights home, David Kessler — who weighs maybe 160 pounds soaking wet — is expounding in a scholarly fashion on the causes of obesity, the subject of the...

Feature

Free Parking for Sale

Many say homeless guys who help commuters find street parking provide a valuable service. But others complain that they cause trouble.

By Ashley Harrell

Published: April 2, 2008

It's not exactly official. It's just two square logs tucked between the pavement and the Caltrain depot, flanked on either end by rusted fencing and graffiti-coated windows. But the people who...

Feature

Building Racism

Segregation and racism are used to pit black and Latino carpenters against each other at a low-income-housing site

By Lauren Smiley

Published: March 26, 2008

As the Aguilar brothers remember it, one afternoon last August the management had some workers cook up shrimp soup and fried fish for the Latino construction men who were picking up their checks....

Feature

Working-Class Struggle

Three housekeepers and a day laborer take action against deadbeat employers who abuse immigrants

By Matt Smith

Published: March 19, 2008

Gloria Esteva, a diminutive housekeeper from Oaxaca, Mexico, is wearing an orange T-shirt and carrying a large bullhorn. She exhorts a crowd of about 50 protesters who are standing before a gate...

Feature

SF's Most Maddening

Published: March 12, 2008

Attention, readers: Help us choose the city’s most annoying person or institution. Cast your vote here! Within the next week, March Madness office pools will be diminishing...

Feature

SF Supervisor Aaron Peskin's Message to Newsom: Quit Attacking Me!

By John Geluardi

Published: March 5, 2008

Aaron Peskin walks into North Beach's legendary Caffe Trieste, wearing a natty olive suit and acting like he owns the place. Seven years after the neighborhood preservationist was elected to the...

Feature

The USF Dons Have Gone from National Champs to National Chumps

By Ron Russell

Published: February 27, 2008

It's a gloriously sunny afternoon, and Eddie Sutton has slipped away from his tomblike office at the University of San Francisco to return a phone call from the relative quiet of the lobby inside...

Feature

The Demise of Hyphy

Thizzle, bling, and blunts may have helped bring down the overhyped hyphy movement. But KMEL pulled the trigger.

By Eric K. Arnold

Published: February 20, 2008

After breaking through to mainstream pop-culture awareness in 2006, the Bay Area's youthful, party-oriented hyphy movement seemed poised to become the next big thing. Fueled by cannabis, thizz...

Feature

Wikipedia Idiots: The Edit Wars of San Francisco

By Mary Spicuzza

Published: February 13, 2008

It can take just one sentence — if not one word — to start a war on Wikipedia. One recent war of words on the "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" — known as an "edit war" in...

Feature

Gay and Transgender Divas Battle for Stardom in Bay Area's Ballroom Scene

By Lauren Smiley

Published: February 6, 2008

Starr shifted her weight as she stood on a mostly deserted Broadway in downtown Oakland, looking up at the second-floor windows of Historic Sweet's Ballroom. The pounding house music taunted her,...