Feature Archives

On January 20th, a meeting on the USF campus was held in protest of the sudden and unannounced shutdown of 34-year-old college station KUSF the day before. The station's FCC license was sold for $3.75 million on January 18th, in a secret deal of which almost nobody at the station had prior knowledge. Shocked and outraged station personnel, supporters, students, a media studies professor, and other media made up close to 500 people who rallied outside the packed auditorium. Supporters plan to attend the Board of Supervisors meeting January 25th at City Hall.

The 34th America's Cup will be held in San Francisco in 2013 and hundreds of thousands of tourists are expected to come to see the sailing races. Critics fear that the No Sit-Lie Law recently created by the passage of Proposition L will be especially enforced during the event and tenants will be required to move away from new construction areas. Still others are concerned about expenditures including an estimated $4 million for a beefed up police presence.

On New Year's Eve, as it has for the past six years, Santa Cruz hosted the DIY New Years Parade, what has become both a homespun, family-friendly alternative celebration and a controversial embarrassment for the city. The result of six years of do-it-yourself community organizing, the Last Night DIY Parade, a community-sponsored New Year's Eve celebration again hit Santa Cruz streets.

A week before the November 2nd elections, a group of artists liberated six San Francisco billboards and sixty bus shelter ads to defeat Proposition L, a ballot measure that would ban sitting on the sidewalk. The group, calling itself the Sit/Lie Posse, replaced ads throughout the city with handmade prints rendered in the style of corporate advertising. Confronting the backers of the proposition, the posse lavished attention on sites around City Hall, the Chronicle, the Haight-Ashbury district and many other neighborhoods.

On Thursday, October 28th at 7pm will be a screening at the United Presbyterian Church in Watsonville of Simon Sedillo's new documentary, The Demarest Factor: US Military Mapping of Indigenous Communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. This film and workshop presentation discusses a recent investigation into U.S. military mapping of communally owned indigenous land in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Environmental activists at San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network (R.A.N.) pulled off an elaborate hoax on San Ramon-headquartered Chevron on Monday. Together with spoof specialists The Yes Men, R.A.N. created a look alike web site mocking Chevron's new “We Agree” advertising campaign. The political prank included phony press releases and a slogan attributed to Chevron “We Agree: Oil companies should clean up their messes."

New Leaf, a 35-year-old San Francisco center that offered mental health and substance abuse services for low-income, queer, and trans folks, has closed. Gay Shame organized a protest in front of the Department of Public Health and dramatized their frustration with the department's lack of support for New Leaf with street theater.