SFist interviews Kenneth Ryan, Prop Master of the San Francisco Ballet...

Good news for students of the struggle of the proletariat: even if you don't have time to read Marx, there are alternatives. Like Paul Krugman, Harpers, Howard Zin, Noam Chomsky, the Guardian of London -- and even our very own home-grown SF Bay Guardian. This reading list is the result of a conversation that started innocently enough on the SFBG's blogs, in a post about homelessness in Golden Gate Park and, tangentially, the Spanish......

All of you YouTube addicts out there are probably familiar with many of the "absoludicrous"* found video clips from Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett's touring Found Footage Festival (*Mr. T makes an appearance in the "Celebrities Who Teach" series). The critically-acclaimed event will be in San Francisco tonight and tomorrow night at the Roxie Red Vic at 7:15 p.m. and 9:15 p.m. and this Sunday at the Parkway in Oakland for a 5 p.m.......

As you have probably already noticed, we've made some changes around here. Yesterday morning SFist, its publisher Gothamist, and our sister sites unveiled a new option: guest comments are automatically not displayed for users. But if you do want to read guests' comments, simply click "Show Guest Comments" and -- poof! -- all will be revealed. At least for now. This is but one step in the process of getting rid of guest comments......

Ahhh, the lazy days of summer keep on keeping on, yet the commentary here on SFist continues to be fast, furious, fierce, and even funny. We like when you talk back to us about stuff--some of our favorite comments from last week follow....

A link to a funny video re: the inadvisability of allowing comments in a business situation. ...

We're both flattered an saddened by our witty betters at Gawker -- flattered that they stole our idea to spotlight comments (not that we're especially innovative in doing so, but still); a little saddened that theirs is already so much better in its execution. Depressing, yet we soldier on, because many of your thoughts deserve to be read a second time. Here's this week's top 5....

It's now been ten days since C.W. Nevius went off on the Gav for letting people camp in Golden Gate Park. Things shook out pretty much as you'd expect: follow-up articles , reactions from the Supes, letters to the Editor, promises from the Mayor, frothy commentary here on SFist, and a new issue du jour: what to do with all of the used heroin needles that turn up everywhere? The Chron article explores two possible......

You know how sometimes we point out when an out-of-town publication takes an outside-in look at our fair city? We've pointed to such pieces in the L.A. Times and the Economist even recently. Well, our lovely sister site, LAist, did much the same, criticizing San Francisco Chronicle Food Maestro Michael Bauer's recent take on the L.A. Food scene. ...

Oh, Michela Alioto-Pier! Our favorite absentee supervisor finally straggled on in to an actual committee meeting, only to find out that the code of conduct she's proposing for the supervisors has loopholes big enough for a Mack truck to drive though. As you may remember, Alioto-Pier (or MAP, as we like to call her) is spearheading the push to institute a code of conduct for supervisors, after the flap about Chris Daly saying that there......

You guys know what this is about by now: our readers' commentary is the sheen on the apple that is SFist, and we like to recognize those whose input has amused, educated, or otherwise titillated us every week. Our choices for last week's Top 5 follow....

Yay! SFist Mihi's back on the scene, covering the opening night festivities for the SF Jewish Film Fest! The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF) is the first and only Jewish film festival in the world. At least that's what the President of the SFJFF said at the Castro Theatre last night when he introduced the opening night movie, Sweet Mud. This is the kind of thing that makes us so proud to live here.......

Plenty of interesting stuff happened in San Francisco last week, and our readers, as always, added funny, insightful, and interesting angles to the stuff we wrote about. Our fabulous five for last week -- the first week with a new guy in the top spot! -- follows....

Recently accounced mayoral candidate, activist Josh Wolf, was seeking signatures to get him on the ballot sans fee at the Noe Valley Farmers' Market on Saturday. It wasn't a great day for it weather-wise, but he was meeting and greeting nonetheless....

La Vie En Rose (the Embarcadero) is a full course, all four food groups, soup and cocktails, dinner of a film. (It screened at the SFIFF, and we loved it then too!) And if you haven’t had your fill by the end of Olivier Dahan’s homage to the great Parisian icon Edith Piaf (breathtakingly portrayed by Marion Cotillard), you can always watch it again. The strongest cross-section of decadence and nutrition is the ATA’s Sunday......

Good God, it was cold out last night. On our trek up to the Greek Theater in Berkeley to see Arcade Fire in the first of their two gigs in the area, we ended up having to stop by the American Apparel store on Bancroft and Telegraph to buy a scarf. Who knew they even sold scarves at the daringly-bare no-sweatshop emporium? We are now officially so old, we didn't even bother looking for......

Happy Memorial Day! Here's some stuff to do if you're not barbecuing. Hey, remember that interview that SFist Rain did with Mystery Science Theater 3000's Mike Nelson last week, about his new project, Rifftrax? Download an .mp3 of the MST3K folks and play it while watching its corresponding mainstream movie! GENIUS. Well, you can see Mike yourself at RiffTrax Live tonight -- they won't say what movie's going to be screening (all we've got is......

Esther Hwang picked a bad day for a press conference -- normally, the media would be all over the former Willie Brown secretary turned cheesecake model turned San Francisco Law School student discussing the $1 million lawsuit she's filed against the SFPD for alleged brutality against her outside a North Beach bar -- but with everyone distracted by Ed Jew's flight from the law, Carole Migden's cancer-related bad driving, and in a city that now......

SFist received the following note from a local hiring manager that was annoyed at a particular response regarding a position she posted on Craigslist. We found it amusing. Please note that details have been changed to protect the involved parties. "A while back I anonymously posted a job on Craigslist. In the four years I've been a hiring manager, CL has really garnered the best results. Even so, you know how it goes: you......

All those folks who are still complaining about the cancellation of "Mystery Science Theater 3000"--and by "all those folks," we mean us--wake up! The MST3K guys are still at it--they just aren't trapped in space any more. In fact, Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy will be in San Francisco this weekend skewering a film in front of a live audience with RiffTrax Live. RiffTrax is Mike Nelson's clever venture which allows him......

We're pretty sure you guys have noticed, but there've been a few changes around these here parts. First, if you'll point your gaze toward the top you'll see a swell menu bar. Also importantly, we've gone to a 10 posts per page model -- and since we usually manage 15 or more per weekday, we encourage you to check out the second page every day once you're done with the first. Don't miss out an early story if you log on late!...

Tonight - two shows open (one show leaves) at Steven Wolf Fine Arts (49 Geary Ste. 411): Orly Corgan's The Wonder of You, and Sentences by Nicholas Knight - both artists are from New York. In her post-modern feminist tapestries, Cogan takes vintage tablecloths and other linens from days gone by and transforms them through embroidery into an erotic fantasyland featuring mostly her. She muses, eats sweets, snorts coke, contemplates kissing frogs and kicks around......

Photos from San Francisco's Critical Mass, April 2007...

Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic is a culinary school graduate that writes about food and television. What's not to love? She's best known for her scathing, funny, and exhaustive coverage of several shows over at Television Without Pity, where she uses the nom du plum of Keckler--we'll be the first to admit (as we have before): her coverage of Top Chef is second to none. She's also a regular at where we first met her), and has her very own food-centric bloggie, The Grub Report. Check out our recent discussion for details on an a cup of salsa's epic journey, a bit on being a cheese archivist, the ressurection of our favorite word from Top Chef Season Two ("craveable"), and some insight into the challenges in writing loads and loads about television at the very popular TWOP. ...

Seeing beyond Sight What happens when you give visually impaired children cameras and ask them to capture their everyday life? Come find out at this exhibit for a new book by Tony Deifell, Seeing Beyond Sight: Photography by Blind Teenagers. Accompanying the revelatory photographs is commentary and reflections by the artists. If you can't make it tonight, the show runs until May 12 but stop by around 6 until 8pm to catch a glimpse of......

The Chron ran an article on Sunday that we really, really wanted to write some commentary on after reading it. "Food bloggers dish up plates of spicy criticism"; subhead "Formerly formal discipline of reviewing becomes a free-for-all for online amateurs." We really wanted to say something because, well, we think it's a huge load of crap, and somebody, aside from one of the injured parties, has to call bullsh**. For crying out loud, they upset our beloved Tablehopper. They took her quote out of context. How dare you, sirs. How dare you?...

It's our de rigueur day-after-the-scandal post, where we compile all the links we can find about the thing we were all talking about yesterday and turn it into a post for the next day! For those of you just tuning in -- here's the link to our original story, and here's a link to Jennifer Siebel's infamous comment (the one that the Chron has chosen not to print). So before we get started, we just......

Here's our Caption Action entry for the picture above! Oscar winner Al Gore, Oscar-less Leonardo diCaprio, and our pick in the pool for Best Supporting Actor (in the role of John Nelson), Peter Ragone. And yes, you heard it correctly from commenter Ragone Has Resigned -- former mayoral press secretary Peter Ragone is leaving his recently retitled job as Director of Communications in City Hall to move up the street to work out of......

So the blog LA Observed ran a caption contest for the picture you see at your left, of Paris Hilton with their mayor-about-town Antonio Villaraigosa. They got the usual level of "that's hot" Paris references and obscure "I'd like to join YOUR LA school board" inside-politics commentary, but, entertainingly enough, look who else got invited to the Villaraigosa-Hilton party! Here's two of the winning captions: --Wait until Gavin Newsom sees this picture. and --So, um,......

Hello there! You might know this correspondent as Gavin Newsom press secretary and SFist comment-spoofer Peter Ragone/John Nelson's "that rita chick is kind of weird" and subsequent KGO 7 fame. (!!!!!!) This whole thing is so bizarre -- you know, you go to one event where people show up in chicken suits and just look what happens! Did SFist really get name-checked at the Board of Supervisors' meeting yesterday???? So please pardon us if we've......