steve@sfbg.com

For the last 17 years, CELLspace has been a hub for unique cultural, artistic, and community events in the heart of the Mission. The bad news is that CELLspace is losing its lease, but the good news is it's being taken over by creative, resourceful people from its community who plan maintain and expand its mission.

In the process, CELLspace is undergoing a renovation and, beginning in early December, getting a new name: Inner Mission. Read more »

>>See this guide on one page and/or print it hereRead more »

San Francisco was where I first learned to gasp and grasp at the possibilities of radical queer self-invention and communal care. This was 1992. I was 19: childhood meant suffocation, college was pointless shit. All around me, people were dying of AIDS and drug addiction and suicide, but finally I was finding other queer incest survivors, whores, vegans, runaways, anarchists, dropouts, drug addicts, sluts, activists and freaks trying not to disappear. Read more »

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL I saw Jack Micheline reciting Skinny Dynamite

on the corner of 16th & Valencia

and he was angry

and the next day he was dead on the last BART train to Concord

and maybe that’s why he was angry

I met Harold Norse shuffling around in a beaten world

his pockets stuffed with poems only hipsters read

It’s a cesspool out here he sighed

before retreating to his room in the Albion Hotel

where angels honeycomb the walls with dreams

and the rent is paid with angry poemsRead more »

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL Of the many things I adore about San Francisco, one of them is that the word "Palestine" is not treated like Voldermort's name, the one that dare not be uttered. You can say you are Palestinian here and no one will freak out. San Franciscans, most of them at least, will not tell you — as Newt Gringrich did — that your culture is invented, or that your identity (or your struggle) is not a valued part of the tapestry of this city.Read more »

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL When I was about 21, living with my parents outside Boston, I started making zines. I sent my first one, Bitch Queen, to Maximum Rock 'n' Roll, and it wound up getting reviewed in MRR's Queer Zine Explosion issue. I hadn't even known there was a queer zine explosion happening, but my little P.O. box was soon stuffed with zines from zinesters wanting to trade issues, and with enough dollar bills that I could cross the street to the mall and get lunch. Read more »

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL Right now, at UC Berkeley, somebody is inventing a new organism. Across the Bay, at the San Francisco hacker space Noisebridge, somebody is programming a giant array of LEDs they bought from a cheerfully piratical Chinese website that sells the lights on long ribbons rolled tightly into bundles. On Mount Tam, long after the park closes on Saturday night, a group of amateur astronomers has set up telescopes and is surveying Messier objects. Read more »

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL Hi my name is Curly. I am a mustache. And this is the story of San Francisco as told by me, a mustache.Read more »

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL Everyone sees the neon signs on street posts over the weekend, but only a few types of people actually stop at estate sales. Early on Friday come the re-sellers—professionals intent on securing cheap, high quality goods that can be resold at pricey consignment shops and on eBay. On Saturdays come the casual shoppers, drawn by the novelty of IKEA prices on antique store treasures. And on Sundays, the hard-core hagglers and bargain hunters arrive, ready to seize upon whatever's left for a few small bills.Read more »

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL Today it's mostly about the rents. People come to my tiny apartment, a shoebox I share with three cats and a genius, and they wonder two things at the same time—what the mad Romantic poet Holderlin called the condition of "pallaksch," an occurrence that presses your yes and no buttons simultaneously. I can see my visitors wondering, you're only an avant-garde writer at the bottom of the heap, how can you afford to live in San Francisco? And another part of them is answering their own questions by guessing, it must be rent control.Read more »