When Mary Graham first started working on her paintings about the paper bag test—an actual comparison that used to be administered to see if a Black person’s skin was light enough to gain them admittance to colorist privileges—she was still a student at San Francisco’s California College of the Arts. She experimented, using scraps of the infamous brown paper bags, as well as plastic bags to explore consumerism and the things we carry in addition to colorism and classicism. But her interest deepened upon graduating in 2022. “As soon as I got out of school, something just kind of happened in my ..read more

Vienna is all the rage in California. The UK Guardian reports that delegations from up and down the state have descended on that Austrian city to look at how it manages to house its population, when “a centrally located two-bedroom apartment can cost you as little as $600 a month.” Social housing in Vienna. Wikimedia Commons Image. From the article: In the past two years, at least four delegations of housing experts and political leaders from California have visited the Austrian capital, hoping to unlock the secrets of why Vienna regularly comes top in surveys of the world’s most li ..read more

City College of San Francisco is one of the town’s most beloved institutions. It survived the July 2012 attack by the Accrediting Commission of Community and Junior Colleges. Two lawsuits–one by the California Federation of Teachers; the other, by San Francisco’s city attorney—chastened the ACCJC, but the negative publicity damaged enrollment, every school’s source of state revenue. Though the college’s stellar academics were never disputed, and the school wasn’t bankrupt, it had been hurt by the Great Recession. Then-Chancellor Don Q. Griffin correctly predicted that two November 2012 ballot ..read more

We have watched in alarm and then horror the past few days as university administrations and local authorities from New York to Los Angeles have chosen to send over-militarized police to clear out non-violently protesting students from campuses. Scenes of professors and journalists, not to mention students valiantly exercising their right to speak out, being beaten and arrested have filled our screens.  This week’s violent crackdown at the University of Texas Austin and last night’s at Columbia University were especially terrifying, as the world witnessed the full forc ..read more

Danny Brown has been repping the wild, eclectic, and undersung Detroit hip-hop scene for almost 15 years, carving a unique path in the industry as a magnetic performer and fascinating personality. After powerhouse opening acts—powerhouse harpist/performance artist Alice Longyu Gao and fellow Detroit rapper Bruiser Wolf—brown wowed the Regency Ballroom crowd with several cuts from his 2023 collab album with JPEGMAFIA Scaring the Hoes and solo album from that year, Quaranta (including anti-gentrification anthem “Jenn’s Terrific Vacation”), as well as classics like “25 Bucks” and “Dip.” Alice L ..read more

British R&B superstar Craig David isn’t afraid of commitment anymore. These days, the smooth “Fill Me In,” “7 Days,” and “Walking Away” singer admits to taking relationships more seriously.  Twenty-four years after breaking worldwide, “I found that this is where commitment kicks in,” he told 48 Hills in a recent interview. So much so that he’s written a song about it. His aptly titled “Commitment,” the follow-up to the sun-kissed R&B number “Abracadabra,” isn’t out yet, but David says it reflects a new, more monogamous attitude toward relationships.  Tired of playing the fiel ..read more

Mayor London Breed refused today to commit to fully funding the city’s Right to Counsel Program, which has prevented hundreds of evictions in the past five years, although she said she would make sure it is “appropriately” funded. In response to a question by Sup. Dean Preston, she said: “We know this is a difficult budget year, and tough decisions will need to be made.” Mayor Breed won’t promise to protect a program that has prevented homelessness. (This is exactly why journalists are taught to avoid the passive voice; “decisions will need to be made” is like Nixon’s press secretary saying “m ..read more

Celebrity and/or notoriety—two concepts that seem pretty interchangeable these days, since so often a celebrity’s primary value is their gossipy notoriety—are explored in three new movies this weekend. One is a documentary tribute to one of the Swinging Sixties’ most infamous “It Girls;” another a lavish biopic about her equivalent a couple centuries prior; a third records one of the most grotesque instances yet of fame via “reality TV.” Catching Fire begins with its posthumous subject (well, an actor reading from her unpublished memoirs) saying “I’ve been called a witch, a slu ..read more

Genius drag queen and playwright D’Arcy Drollinger is no stranger to wild dramatics—her star turn as Champagne Horowitz Jones Dickerson White in her film “Shit & Champagne” gave us a delicious taste of her stinging parodic dragsploitation wit. So when we heard that “Bitch Slap!,” her uproarious send-up of nighttime soaps, telenovelas, and romance novels of the ’80s and ’90s, was returning to Oasis SF (through May 18), we knew we needed a deep dive into her hysterical influences. As its tagline promises, “Bitch Slap!” revels in “adultery, blackmail, confessions, amnesia, nervous breakdowns ..read more

Genre is a double-edged sword, as restrictive as it is necessary. It’s a great indicator of what an audience can expect, yet it’s limited in describing a story’s complexity. Since the days of Greek theatre being limited to Tragedy and Comedy, dramatists and storytellers have done their best to free themselves of the confines of genre. One could even say that artists were trying to break free of the stereotypes of genre. Michael R. Jackson’s Tony-sweeping A Strange Loop (West Coast premiere through May 12 at ACT’s Toni Rembe Theater, SF) is a play that merges genres in an attempt to subvert ste ..read more