Maybe Tony Hall needs to put a yellow sticky on his campaign credit card and label it "FOR CAMPAIGN USE ONLY" -- the SF Ethics Commission has decided to proceed on charges against the former city supervisor based on the alleged misuse of funds in his star-crossed attempt to run for mayor last year, and his defense is that he used the wrong credit card. Namely, that $320 of what Tony Hall characterized as "office......

We first became aware of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music back in 2000, when the Coen Brothers' released O Brother, Where Art Thou? After listening to the old-timey music on the soundtrack, we pondered just what we should call that stuff so we could seek out more of it. Was it country music? Bluegrass? Folk? The key factor, at the time, was we wanted to hear the original recordings and not a......

It's time for our second SFIFF movie giveaway! This one's for a Saturday screening (6:15 p.m. at the Kabuki) of The Old Weird America: Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, an uplifting music performance documentary featuring performances by Elvis Costello, Beck, Beth Orton, Sonic Youth, and Philip Glass (and many others), all working through the 1920s and 30s folk and blues discography compiled by musical archivist Harry Smith. You know all that music that......

SFist interviews Kevin Arnold founder of Noise Pop...

Did anyone else get rocked at The Constantines' show last Friday at Cafe Du Nord? The packed and energetic crowd was treated to songs off their last three albums plus a passionate encore of "I'm A Man" by the Spencer Davis Group. After the show singer Steve Lambke was kind enough to let us compliment their set and tell us what he'd been reading (The Old Testament) and what albums influenced The Cons' sound (he......

Hey! Have you wondered what the heck that big building across the street from the parking lot for the Metreon at Fifth and Mission is? Why, it's the Old San Francisco Mint! The original SF Mint was established by President Millard Fillmore in 1850, to facilitate the quicker minting of all the "that there's gold in them thar Sierra hills" business. The mint was then moved to the Fifth and Mission building in 1874, which survived the 1908 quake, but was then deemed too small for the vast coinage required for our great land, at which point the Mint moved to its current location, the bunker surrounded by barbed wire behind the Market Street Safeway....