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Everyone has a gig in ’90s SF. We work jobs but we really slave for an art form that we are still learning how to master. Musicians, painters, dancers, hairstylists, writers, actors, massage therapists, inventors. Everyone is outside and inside at the same time. Everyone works at, and spends a good…

Almost all the people I know in San Francisco who are still making art are either people who were able to buy property decades ago or are, at this moment, knocking on wood hoping they don’t lose their rent-­controlled housing. There is so much money amidst so much poverty and despair that your hear…

The embarrassing truth is I had become somewhat of a townie. I was frequently in a bad mood, disgruntled with the new expensive coffee places and the four-­dollar donuts. I was scowling at fancy cars. Flipping off buildings shaped like glass pricks. Angry at air plants and hand-­milled soap. Raging…

In our model, the café is not the antidote of the office, but its annex, a well-lit atelier for the young urban professional. A string of new concept spaces that have sprung up in Paris in the last several years, appropriately named Anticafé, make this explicit. They are living room retreats for di…

GIL SCOTT-HERON HAS a beautiful song I wish Ta-Nehisi Coates and all of us would listen to again. It’s called “Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?” The title is also the refrain, but the force of the rhetorical question lies in its pithy yoking of materialism and slave capitalism to a logic that t…