SFWeekly's cover story this week is about rapper DMX and what a hard time he's having releasing his latest double-album Walk with Me Now and Fly with Me Later. Niki D'Andrea starts off her piece, the Devil in DMX by saying "Looking at rapper DMX's life is like watching someone punch himself in the face repeatedly." Which makes us not want to look at rapper DMX's life at all, especially if it's going to take the next 7 pages of Internet to do so. The gist of it is that it's really hard to release a double album while one is incarcerated. Apparently the album sounds like "dancing and crying at the same time" and also "like he's barking."
Even in the quieter realm of books, Jonathan Kiefer can't find quiet time while reviewing Berkeley Ph.D. and San Francisco resident Jane McGonigal's new book Reality is Broken, which feels like a stack of lectures and seminars compiled in to a publishable book. The book is about how reality is broken (duh) and how the artificial worlds in video games can make people happy in the real world (people learning or deciding to learn the guitar after tiring of Rock Band and all that), but Kiefer makes a good point when he says that "looking for deeper meaning, it only underscores the shallowness of the meaning we do get from collectively killing 10 billion virtual aliens in Halo 3."
In food, Kauffman checks out Cotogna, the "warehouse reimagined as a farmhouse" and the more rustic little brother to Quince next door. Cotogna isn't just a sequel to Quince though, but "a destination in itself," he says. A place where "old money is joined by foodistas" for affordable dinners. [Sidenote: are we calling them "foodistas" now?]
Finally, the Weekly got around to checking out the Fall of Kittenzilla the mural on Divisadero, which as you know, is long gone. The piece ends with the promise of a new mural from artist Henry Gunderson, which has actually already been tagged over. (Twice.) There's a point in there about the temporary nature of street art and the death of print, but that sounds exhausting.
