Results tagged “sfistlisa”

The U.S. Census Bureau released some new housing data for the years 2000-2005, and there was some semi-good news for two Bay Area cities. San Jose boosted its total housing units by 6.3% to 299,650, while San Francisco's housing stock rose 2.4% to 354,963 units. Yay! More housing is good, what with housing prices affected by "supply" and "demand," right?

You, the voracious reader, will soon be left to repine most piteously, for a most sorrowful event is pending. Yes! Local author Lemony Snicket's final book in A Series of Unfortunate Events, titled The END, is being released next month.

We are big fans of drinks that come with their own props – little plastic monkeys swinging off the rim, entire servings of fruit contained on one tiny sword, paper umbrellas. We still think fondly of the many times we walked out of the Caribbean Zone with a purse full of little cocktail tchotckes. We are thrilled that the Tonga Room is still going strong. However, we are not big fans of negotiating BART after having indulged our affinity for drinks that come with their own props. What is an East Bay resident to do when seized with the urge to drink something out of a big hurricane glass, then chew on a few rum-soaked pineapple chunks?

Although the real-estate bubblewatchers got a head start on the festivities some time last year, we have been waiting until there's a whole lot of data before we begin the "Woe is us!" chant over our monthly (fixed) mortgage statement. That data has all fallen into our laps in the last two days.

Okay, so it’s not a great time to flip your house, and rents are rising, but there are still some real estate developments that are not bad news. Retail rents across San Francisco are up 2.6% over last year to an average of $32.11 per square foot, indicating some competitive demand. Demand = more business in the city. We love business in the city, especially when it might lead to jobs – and it looks like San Francisco’s employers might add another 14,000 jobs.

So maybe the folks back East were all over Fake Writer JT Leroy first, but San Francisco-based author and journalist Jack Boulware has a piece in Salon on Leroy creator Laura Albert (aka Laura Victoria) that looks at the person behind the persona while also painting a pretty vivid picture of what it was like to live in San Francisco in the 1990s.

We were feeling pretty good about the state of the California housing market after reading the PDF of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight's most recent report. Housing prices up 18.8% in the Pacific region! California's housing appreciation up 21.07% over the year-ago period and 4.65% over the previous financial quarter! The Oakland area ranked as number 44 out of 275 urban markets in terms of price appreciation -- East Bay represent! (Silicon Valley was number 47, while San Francisco clocked in at 70.) The dread spector of a depression-style economy prompted by overleveraged condo owners busting out -- averted by continued price climbs!

Having worked in SoMa for seven years, we consider ourselves at least slightly informed as to what's doing in that neighborhood. So we read the New York Times' "36 Hours: SoMa, San Francisco," with some interest, hoping to see some of our favorite drop-in spots in print.

The most recent Bay Area housing stats have come out, issuing a body blow to those who wanted to believe that Zillow.com was wrong, wrong, wrong about their odds of cashing out of that fixer-upper and living like a king someplace else.

Who doesn't love the Parkway Theatre? And who doesn't love Bitch magazine?

We've had a few weeks to digest the news that there's a better than 50/50 chance of home prices falling in the next year, and today's news from the Wall Street Journal only piles on more of the same: housing inventories are rising pretty sharply in some markets.

So are the people behind the J.T. Leroy hoax all irritated that James Frey has gotten the bulk of the publicity -- and subsequent sales boost -- in the "Authors who misrepresent themselves to the public" press beat? Is that why Geoffrey Knoop is now giving interviews in which he admits that (former) partner Laura Albert was the one who created J.T. Leroy, wrote under that name, and duped all sorts of literati?

Saturday, January 28, marks the 20th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger's explosion. SFist can't help but think of the ill-fated tenth mission every time we pass Onizuka Air Force Station down in Sunnyvale. We're not the only space groupies with the anniversary on our minds: the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland will feature a special memorial presentation all day, and screen the movie To Be an Astronaut at 11:30 am and 6:00 pm. General admission to the planetarium is $13, but kids under 13 get in for $9; the center is open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Saturday.

Today marks the first on-air day of the KQED winter pledge drive. The radio station's hoping to raise some serious cash in the next two weeks. We wish them luck -- and wonder how many NPR junkies will be switching over to KALW in search of an uninterrupted fix of Robert Siegel or Renee Montagne.

The Wall Street Journal's East Bay Journal showed us a little love this week with a two-part series on the residential and commercial real estate markets in the Five-and-Dime.

What up, Fat Lip? SFist Jon's not just Schwarzenwatching -- he's also sportzen-editing! Say hi to our new sports editor, who's got a cavalcade of athletic offerings for you. In other SFist correspondent news, we welcomed back our French-toastlicious Opinionated Loudmouth and her Route 1 brunch beat, and we get to know the 510 a little better with our newest contributor, SFist Lisa. Or.... are SFists Lydia and Lisa really ">someone else's sister-in-law dressed in big sunglasses????? We may never know! Speaking of JT Leroy, another local writer gets accused of fudgery too -- but he says there's a totally good explanation, just like the other times it's come up. Miscommunications were all over the news too, with the Home Alone parents claiming they thought grandma was taking care of the autistic kid and his brother, the SFPD fessing up that maybe there wasn't actually a bomb at the Starbucks after all, and our governor admitting that he doesn't actually have a license to drive his motorcycle. Oopses all around! Picture of Rapper Fat Lip Governor Schwarzenegger from Reuters

The namesake for Oakland's shopping/tourist destination was born 130 years ago today in San Francisco. A plaque on the Wells Fargo building at 3rd and Brannan marks his birthplace. As a boy, London moved to Oakland with his family after high rents drove them out of San Francisco; it warms SFist's heart to know that fleeing the city to escaping ever-rising housing costs is something of a civic tradition in the Bay Area.

The massive gap between rental rates and mortgage rates in the Bay Area is often cited as one of the reasons the entire real estate market's headed for certain doom. Having sunk some money into said market, we're very interested in exactly what's going to go on with housing prices and rental rates, so we read the real estate press as carefully as a haruspex examines sheep guts.

The creative team behind J.T. Leroy should send James Frey flowers, since his little revelations have given the J. T. Leroy hoax story a sort of also-ran quality. However, we were pleased to see the San Francisco Chronicle finally pick up the story and give it a well-sourced local angle. First up: the local literary Who's Who with regard to who was sucked in: Dave Eggers, Susie Bright, David Wigand, Michael Ray, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman.

In terms of showy San Francisco-based author biographies, J. T. Leroy's always had Danielle Steel beat. She may have a zillion parking spaces in Pacific Heights and some colorful marital history, but Leroy's alleged life story, complete with trailer-trash teen mother and lurid sex-n-drugs anecdotes, is both mediapathic and the purported foundation for his fiction. It is not, however, any sort of foundation for author appearances. Leroy's fishy public appearances are a postmodernist's wet dream, and "Who is J.T. Leroy, really?" has turned into a parlor game among some folks.

After we got back home from our Christmas vacation, we found we had ourselves a problem. We just couldn't find any space in our closet for the new, beautiful, hand-knit Christmas sweater we got from our elderly aunt. No question, this sweater is a keeper (reindeer were hot on the fall runways in Milan last year) so our only choice is a judicious weeding of the current contents of our tiny closet.

In our ongoing efforts to Stick It To The Man, we threw off the shackles of local cable giants and went with Alameda Power & Telecom for all of our cable service needs. One of the pleasant side effects has been getting public access channel 31, which produces the TV show "Monster Island Theatre."

The California Building Industry Association says this is the year the big housing slowdown in California begins. Housing prices statewide are expected to rise only 5%-8%, compared to the 25%-30% we've all grown to know and love/loathe. The CBIA expects housing starts in the Bay Area -- that's the number of new units built -- to flatten out to 26,000 and 28,000 units, and prices to rise only a little. The California Association of Realtors is more upbeat, forecasting a 6%-12% rise in Bay Area housing prices this year.

So we've finally recovered from the mayhem that goes along with grabbing up calendars at Pendragon Books on January 1 (our haul -- the Alex Ross Mythology wall calendar, the Anne Taintor 2006 Engagement Calendar and the Black Ball 2006 wall calendar -- cost all of $10, or about 1/4 of what we'd have paid if we hadn't braved the sale. The bruises were worth it!) and are now ready to face the world around us.

So SFist's take on the movies made you think you'd like to escape the holiday madness by going to the movies. We understand. We've been hiding from assorted shoppers and/or relatives in our local theatre for years -- sure, the floors are stickier than they would be at home, but at least we're not getting a headache from smiling and biting our tongue.

We've heard of evergreen news stories, but this an evergreen story about decorated evergreens: assorted East Bay neighborhoods inevitably have one or two streets where the decorating is absolutely over-the-top. We are dying to head out to Pleasanton to Widmer World -- 132,000 lights, plus wood figurines and a live Santa, all on Bob and Susan Widmer's lawn. We'll be joining 3,000-5,000 of our closest friends for that one, if previous years' visiting estimates are at all accurate.

The decommissioned Alameda Naval Air Station isn't just where the nuclear wessels used to be kept -- it's now home to plenty of businesses who are taking advantage of all the space the old hangars and barracks offer. One of those is Hangar One Vodka, and we can't think of a better place to kill an afternoon. Get a $10 vodka tasting and work your way down the menu with five different tastings -- we liked the "Buddha's hand" citron and mandarin blossom infused vodkas a lot. Drink up the tasty vodka while drinking in a fantastic view of Yerba Buena and the downtown skyline.

We've had a soft spot for Macromedia since our days hanging out in Multimedia Gulch (you know, back when it was Multimedia Gulch and not just "that neighborhood around the stadium"). We know it officially became part of Adobe Software on December 3, so this post-merger news isn't exactly unexpected, but it's a little sad all the same: Adobe's cutting 10% of its new, combined workforce, or 650-700 jobs. San Francisco won't be the only area to feel the pain -- Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen says cuts will be world-wide -- but that doesn't make it hurt any less.