I can’t believe the Yeah Yeah Yeahs filmed their latest video, Zero, in San Francisco’s Chinatown. I have so many memories there that it’s just bizarre seeing her walk through the Sacramento tunnel and up the hill to V.I.P. bakery. Fuck yes.
Oh, at 2:30 Karen O freaks out some old chinese ladies walking by.
Over the past year or so I’ve heard about Yelp’s extortion tactics. If you have bad reviews, they can make it go away. If you need some help, they can put your listing at the top of all relevant searches as a recommended business. For a cost.
Several business owners likened Yelp to the Mafia, and one said she feared its retaliation. “Every time I had a sales person call me and I said, ‘Sorry, it doesn’t make sense for me to do this,’ … then all of a sudden reviews start disappearing.”
Last year, I ran into an old acquaintance who had been working for Yelp, and he was definitely not aware of this tactic when I brought it up. Tack this onto the completely skewed system of a five star rating, and you’re left with a pretty useless site, since anything below a four star isn’t really going to be considered good. Why not just have a thumbs up or thumbs down system? Either you like it or you don’t.
Also, you get these really antagonizing reviews from keyboard warriors.
Thanks, @selfedge.
It’s been talked about for some time. Even before the rumors started, I had secondhand confirmation from some other folks. More lines. More queues.
Via @selfedge via Mission Mission.
This is heartbreaking news. The newspaper I grew up reading, SF Chronicle, is facing closure in the wake up continued annual deficits.
Hearst said that the Chronicle lost more than $50 million last year and that this year’s losses to date are worse. The Chronicle has had major losses each year since 2001.
Beyond my own personal attachment to reading the Chronicle, they’ve been around for quite some time. In fact, the closure of such a well-known paper could be a slow actualization of print media losing it’s ground to declining readership and increased Internet resources. Yahoo! News has more in-depth statistics of the Chronicle’s performance and it’s ranking through nationwide circulation.
The paper employs 275 news staff and is the 12th-largest in the United States, according to the U.S. Audit Bureau of Circulations, with average weekday circulation of 339,430. It is the 19th-largest paper by Sunday circulation.
I never realized how big the Chronicle was and had always looked at it like my small local paper. Something else to be proud about as a San Franciscan.
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Medicine for Melancholy is a film directed by Barry Jenkins and features Wyatt Cenac and Tracey Higgins as two people who recover from a one-night stand, only to follow-up with a day of exploration through various parts of San Francisco while reflecting the dichotomy between the city and their identities as black Americans.
Micah is a preternaturally chill native San Franciscan who feels increasingly alienated as the city rapidly gentrifies. “Imagine the Lower Haight filled with nothing but black folk and white artists,” he tells Jo, his would-be lover, about his long-gone San Fran. (It’s become the least black of America’s major cities.) Jo, wary at first but charming over time, is a transplant who doesn’t see the world in Micah’s specifically racialized terms, and it’s implied by the relative sizes of their living spaces that she occupies a higher position in the economic food chain. Both though, are black people partaking in a social milieu where Negroes are rarities. None of this tension is anywhere near as didactic as it may sound; these issues come up intermittently in the course of the pair walking and biking around, making each other laugh and generally feeling each other out.
I have always yearned for some poetic reflection on the state of San Francisco, the city I grew up in, as it has grown and morphed into a somewhat placated upper middle class of families. As a result, what has been born is a group of tweens, teens, and young adults, all searching for something greater in a city that seems to be innoculated with the rising cost of quaint comfort. Searching for identity, love, and reason may just be as hard to find in San Francisco as it is finding a decent and affordable place to live.
Via Racialicious.
Featured on Street Peeper today. Thanks, Hap.
Gavin Newsom discusses gay marriage
This is a really thoughtful and articulate piece. You can follow him @gavinnewsom.