From the tallest skyscraper in the City of Brotherly Love to Canadian tourism copywriting brilliance, here's what you should know from our -ist cities: This week, Phillyist took a gleeful listen to the White Stripes' exciting new release, watched in awe as their new tallest skyscraper was finally completed, found a cheaper way to get to Gothamist, invented a tasty new dessert, and brought back their Craigslist Round-Up feature with a bang. Bostonist watches......

This isn't strictly new, but you can be forgiven for having missed it if you're not one of those people who trolls the Apple website all day long, slobbering all over the keyboard with each new reflective GIF you find and having conversations that contain the repeated use of the phrase "brushed metal." It's a BART Widget! (Or "Bidget.") You can use it for getting all over the East and South Bay, in the......

...because SFist Rita can't! OK, last week's winner was the Guardian. It's their 39th anniversary, and we're talking about housing in the city. Cover story: characterless and expensive condos on the East side. The Warfield sues the Weekly, claiming, among other things, that a Bill Graham staffer threateded to "f**k up" the Warfield. (SFist f**ks stuff up all the time, where's our cool lawsuit?). Oakdale projects are unbelievably squalid. Third Street light rail will......

Bet you're sorry now that you didn't pick San Francisco for the Video Music Awards, MTV! Apparently all pre-VMA parties for Sunday's VMAs in Miami have been cancelled in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The storm hit Miami right as this year's VMA host, Sean Combs (we are now point-blank refusing to call him Puffy, Puff Daddy, P. Diddy, or Diddy, because, well, that's ridiculous) cut the ceremonial ribbon at "Hotel MTV" on Wednesday, so yesterday and tonight's parties all got cancelled. Sorry, Ricky Martin's listening party and the Hotel MTV B-Ball Tournament f/ the Ying Yang Twins and Mike Jones! See, MTV? Gavin was right; we would have been an excellent venue! We're having bee-yoo-tee-ful weather out here this weekend -- not too hot, not too cold, and the fog makes for beautiful sunsets. SF would have been a great place to watch our local boys from Green Day win some Moonmen. Oh well, MTV -- we'll just enjoy our city without you this weekend. (Gosh, we hope Farnsworth Bentley's umbrella doesn't flip inside out over Mr. Combs in the high winds out there in Miami, that would be terrible.) ...

The Chron's Matier and Ross get back to the gossip we pay twenty-five cents in the MUNI for and report that Gav Daddy Newsom is aggressively wooing MTV to throw the 2005 VMAs in San Francisco. Certainly, San Francisco in August will be much less humid than Miami's ceremonies in 2004, where everyone looked kind of flushed and sticky. Overexcited Gavin, presumably hoping to see his secret crush the Heiress Paris again, said: "In terms of showcasing the city, this is about as good as it gets. I won't say it's equivalent to the Super Bowl, but in terms of the energy, enthusiasm and particularly the demographics, it's a perfect fit for San Francisco." Can't wait to see Nick and Jessica at the End Up! M&R also use the opportunity to get in some digs about Gavin's inability to settle the hotel strike, and also to run that same old picture of Brit and Madonna making out. (If we only had Photoshop, we'd have given you a picture of Matier and Ross making out, but alas, we don't, so you get the other famous VMA makeout, Michael Jackson attacking Lisa Marie Presley.) The other cities under consideration by MTV are Hotlanta, San Diego, and perennial favorite New York. ...

We should confess that, before seeing the Sundance award-winning documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston this Sunday for the second weekend of IndieFest, we didn't know very much about the eponymous singer-songwriter -- liked that charmingly-naive Speeding Motorcycle song, remembered vaguely that Kurt Cobain had worn a Johnston shirt at the MTV Video Music Awards one year, and oh yeah, wasn't he also mentally ill, but not the guy who did that "Alanis Morrisette" song? Forty-four year old Daniel Johnston's life is sort of an outsider artist indie rock legend -- he drifted into Austin, Texas in the mid-80s, after dropping out of the circus (no, really!). He wandered around town, giving out copies of his album Hi How Are You, which he had recorded himself on a Sony boom box. People found the songs compelling, and when MTV swung into town for their show The Cutting Edge, they thought Johnston's crazy antics would make for good TV. Unfortunately, the crazy antics were probably also a sign that Johnston was becoming increasingly bipolar. The Devil and Daniel Johnston documents Johnston's life, music, and his mental illness, through interviews with family members, friends, and Johnston's own archives. Johnston, a profilic artist, had been making biographical films and cassettes since he was a child and sending tape-recorded letters to his friends, and granted the filmmakers access to the material. It's really an amazing and thought-provoking film. Art by Daniel Johnston...

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