32-year-old painter and friend of SFist Joey DeRuy has lived a lot of places before settling in San Francisco. In addition to pursuing a career in fine art painting, Mr. DeRuy takes classes at SF City College and has taken a number of photos for SFist at events like Outside Lands and Treasure Island Music Fest.

He established himself in the Dallas art scene in the early part of this decade, getting a number of private and public commissions, including one for a Dallas cityscape that appears on the first commemorative poster for the Dallas City Arts celebration. He had a show at the Dallas Museum of Art during their 100th anniversary, and since relocating to San Francisco he's been published in Juxtapoz magazine, 7x7, New Art International, and New West. This year he was also named Best Artist in SF Weekly's Readers Poll. In anticipation of his first solo show in San Francisco tonight at Indie Industries in North Beach (218 Columbus), SFist posed a few questions to Mr. DeRuy about his life and art.

North Beach strip club Heaven, the strip/prostitute club that had City Attorney Dennis Herrera (rightfully) slammed as "a public nuisance, having allegedly violated city codes and having been cited for prostitution," was ordered to cease operations starting today. According to SF Appeal, "In a release sent by his office, Herrera says 'Today's ruling should send a message to other would-be operators of illegal businesses that even Heaven is subject to temporal laws here in San Francisco.... It's regrettable that this business chose to expend so much effort to flout the law rather than to follow it, and that a preliminary injunction was necessary to shut it down.'" Will other strip club that allow whoring (i.e., most all of them) fall like dominoes? Only time will tell. If you recall, the owner of Heaven, Peter Lambertson, says that the only reason his club was targeted was because he didn't pony up freebies to "patrons who identified themselves as off-duty officers asked to be comped on extras" -- i.e., receiving sex for free.

Late yesterday morning, a three-alarm fire in North Beach tore through four units on the 600 block of Green Street (also known as Beach Blanket Babylon Boulevard), next door to the famed Beach Blanket Babylon theater. (The theater was unscathed, with show performances, for better for for worse, being unaffected by the blaze.) Although the fire was controlled less than an hour after firefighters arrived, it managed to displace six residents and cause around $1.35 million worth of damage. No injuries were reported.