It's been a long time since we randomly clicked on a band's website and were utterly captivated by the music we heard. We saw Bowerbirds' name and photo in Cafe Du Nord's show listings and were drawn to listen to the songs they stream on their site. It's amazing the beauty you can find sometimes just by turning over a few rocks. The music is homespun and intimate; Phil's gentle croon and the spare......

SFist Wendy's back at the theater! Even though there's no film fests in town, we stopped by the movie theater and checked out American Fusion, which opened this past weekend at the Sundance Kabuki. This film totally reminded us of a Jimmy Kimmel Patton Oswald joke we heard a few years ago that references the breaks one gets upon growing older. Well, the wickedly funny Taiwanese grandmother, played by Lan Yeung, was not 100 (which......

Oh, Chris Daly's going to have a field day with this one for his own blog -- the Chronicle Local News Blog gleefully reports that, at Sunday's Celebrity All-Star game at AT&T Park, former college baseball player Mayor Gavin Newsom: 1) went 0-for, not hitting anything pitched to him; 2) was on the losing side of the 13-8 score for the National League 3) hit a pop-up, which was promptly palmed by Dancing with the......

Happy New Year everyone! What We Did On Our Christmas Vacation After having our plans to fly to Denver thwarted by a sinister snowstorm, we headed straight to Texas. We spent most of the time in Houston with our family and managed to type out our top 10 albums of '06 while our nephews watched "Pirates of the Carribbean" for the nth time. One night was spent in Austin with one of our favorite people......

Geez, guys, isn't the first rule not to talk about it? CNN picks up an AP report about a chatty high-tech fight club in Menlo Park. The group ("Gentlemen's Fight Club") is by invite only, involves at least a dozen people, and the only protective gear they can wear are either a fencing mask or hockey mask. Weapons include pillowcases stuffed with soda cans, frying pans, and tennis rackets. It's so Dwight Schrute! There are......

Our concert picks for the week of 3/24 - 3/30. We've often lamented about the burden of too many choices, last week's trip to Austin being an extreme example. Looks like a goodly amount of those choices followed us back to San Francisco. Last night's excursion to see The Sights (White Stripes' pared-down Detroit bombast + Allman Bros.' noodle-y soul) and The Kills (doomy and captivating, but we'd still prefer a live drummer) was just......