The Bay Guardian is moving — into the mall. Yeah, we know, it struck us the same way initially. But the space we’ll be sharing with our sister newspapers within San Francisco Media Company, San Francisco Examiner and SF Weekly, on the fifth floor of the Westfield Mall is a nice, sprawling sets of offices that previously housed the San Francisco State University extension program. As we make our move on the afternoon of June 27, however, our SFBG.com website will be down for a few hours in the evening while our servers transition to their new digs. And the next time you’re in the mall, you can wave to us from the food court.
ARCHIVES IMPERILED
A sad note during Pride celebrations: The vast and essential GLBT Historical Society this week sent word out that its building’s rent had jumped an unaffordable 30 percent, and that it would have to find a new home within 18 months. The nonprofit society’s historical archives contains more than 80,000 photographs dating from the 1880s, 5,000 posters, 4,000 magazines, and tens of thousands of other artifacts. Anybody got a free basement? For more info and to see how you can help, see www.glbthistory.org.
ALL THE ‘T’
Award-winning documentary What’s the T?, which follows five local transgender women and allows them to tell their own stories, is streaming on Hulu.com as part of the Web TV site’s Pride week. “To understand the ladies of What’s the T? is to love them,” says San Francisco-based filmmaker Cecilio Asuncion of his film’s subjects. Look for all five to be riding in the Pride parade Sun/29.
FREE LUV
The ULUV Music Day Sat/21 saw more than 100 musicians performing in parklets, BART stations, coffee shops, and other public locations in every neighborhood in San Francisco. Culminating in a musician flash mob at Dolores Park and a proclamation from the city, the day was organized by Michael Starita and Robin Applewood of ULUV, a charitable organization designed to build community and financial support for Bay Area musicians (ie, let’s stop them from feeling the need to move to LA). The organization’s next event will be a happy hour on July 16 featuring Nathan Blaz of Georgrapher, location TBA. Check www.uluvmusic.com for more.
SAVE LOST WEEKEND!
Dateline: San Francisco. Chilling news, via Facebook, on the “all the cool shit is in danger” front, with a post by Valencia Street stalwart Lost Weekend Video. “Times are tough at Lost Weekend Video! We’ve seen business suddenly drop by 30 percent just in the last few months, on top of the 60 percent hit we’ve already taken over the last few years. This has thrown us into a pretty immediate crisis.” The post went on to say the video store is hoping to bring in a co-tenant to share costs (similar to the partnership between Le Video and Green Apple Books) and ended on a cautiously optimistic note: “We’re a year away from 20, it’d be nice to see it!” Reached at Lost Weekend Monday afternoon, co-owner David Hawkins said, “We realize that you can’t probably sustain a full-scale video store in the city the way you used to. So it’s just a matter of trying to come up with the right formula.” See www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision for more.
MARTHA DOES THE MISSION
What kind of San Francisco dining establishments are good enough for a notoriously choosy lifestyle guru worth $300 million? The same ones populated by 20-something Missionites, it turns out: After checking out Mission Chinese on her last jaunt through town, Martha Stewart was spotted this past Thursday and Friday at Ichi Sushi and Tartine; she posted a photo of a ham and cheese croissant from the latter, noting it was “worth the wait.” Fifty bucks to anyone who gets her drunk at 500 Club next time.
DAM RIGHT
It’s obvious why the recent eco-activist documentary DamNation has won so many dam(n) awards. Last week, the David Brower Center in Berkeley screened the film, which was released May of this year. The “powerful film odyssey across America” explores how dams affect rivers, fish, the environment and more. The cinematography feels like a Wes Anderson film, and Ben Knight’s witty yet informative narration is laced with sass. And if the politics and beautiful images aren’t enough to draw you in, the interviews, photo montages of activists running naked through pre-dam Glen Canyon, and videos of the crew trespassing to graffiti dams and film explosions will. Go to damnationfilm.com to learn more or to host a screening.
COFFEE SPIES
You love Philz. We love Philz. Everybody loves Philz! Apparently, Phils loves us too, enough to peer deep into customers’ data anytime they connect to its Wi-Fi — and to sell it to the highest bidder. Specifically, news outlets have reported, the hand-pour masters partnered with Euclid Analytics to track and sell the Media Access Control (MAC) address of devices connected to its Wi-Fi. After the news blew up on ABC 7, Philz backed down, and announced it’d sever its icky Big Brother partnership. We’d like that Turkish with no sugar and no spying, please.
GOLDEN NO MORE?
Basketball news site the RealGM is reporting a spicy rumor: that the Golden State Warriors will change their name to the San Francisco Warriors after their move across the Bay. The team’s new Mission Bay stadium might have something to do with the switch. RealGM tweeted the photos, too, with a big SF over a basketball as the new logo.
ILLEGAL MONKEYS
An iPhone app that lets users auction off their parking spots might sound like a novel idea, especially in parking-deprived San Francisco. Unfortunately for Paolo Dobrowolny, co-founder and CEO of the MonkeyParking app that does exactly that, the practice is also illegal. City Attorney Dennis Herrera issued a cease-and-desist demand against MonkeyParking. “Technology has given rise to many laudable innovations in how we live and work — and Monkey Parking is not one of them,” Herrera said in a statement. “It’s illegal, it puts drivers on the hook for $300 fines, and it creates a predatory private market for public parking spaces that San Franciscans will not tolerate.”