In The City That Was, Bohemian Archivist P Segal tells a weekly story of what you all missed: the days when artists, writers, musicians, and unemployed visionaries were playing hard in the city’s streets and paying the rent working part time. The Savoy. If you’ve ever wandered up Grant Avenue in North Beach,

Yesterday Stuart invited me to try out a Beta version of this new site Ello. My knowledge went no further than a pal mentioned he had applied to join. I thought that sounded rather official for a social networking site, so I decided to investigate. Ello was started in early

I don’t go to the Folsom Street Fair. It comes to me. Literally, I open my front door onto it. So, Sunday was a pretty fucking insane day. I saw men dressed as firemen blowing each other (there’s a joke about hoses there). I saw people dressed as horses dragging

The world adapted to the radio sounds of folk powerhouse bands with hand claps, glockenspiels and taiko drum appropriations. I can’t be the only one that yearns for new music, but that shakes the core like my go-to tracks collecting dust in their near obsolete jewel cases. With Dylan Shearer’s

In 2002 I was 21-years-old and living under a perpetual state of underground hiphop. With the exception of my mother’s Beatles albums slipping in the mix while I got stoned with my Home Depot co-workers, Living Legends, Hiero, BDP, Aesop Rock and Atmosphere were pretty much on continuous loop. But,

In 2014, using Facebook is about as exciting as your flossing routine: idle, half-assed, and embedded in life’s daily humdrum. On your increasingly predictable feed, even that one insane girl you went to second grade with has ceased to be entertaining. Where there were once titillating overshares, there are now

Paul Madonna writes and draws the weekly series All Over Coffee, which is published in the San Francisco Chronicle, He is the author of two books, All Over Coffee (City Lights 2007), and Everything is its own reward (City Lights 2011), which won the NCBR Recognition Award for Best Book in 2011.  The man has a gift for

After watching Sign Painters, the film directed by Faythe Levine and Sam Macon which documents the history of hand-painted signs, one can’t help but find irony in the withering crop of these sign artisans and their fading works of art. The journey in Sign Painters begins in the Midwest, where