Culture + Travel Archives

PSA: Stop Harassing Santa Cruz’s Sea Otters

26Jul

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Culture + Travel, Hyperlocal News + Stories, Nature + Climate Crisis, News to Know

PSA: Stop Harassing Santa Cruz’s Sea Otters

Y'all really need to chill TFO and let Sea Otter 841 vibe. If you don't, your actions could lead to her death. The surfboard-stealing female sea otter in Santa Cruz has evolved from a hyperlocal news story to a ubiquitous touchstone in pop culture. (The New York Times covered the virality around this infamous marine mammal with a chef’s kiss headline.) Though like we’ve mentioned before: The temporary theft of these flotation devices isn’t cute. It’s a territorial act. And an increasingly aggressive one at that. The otter, which has since been well-known as "Sea Otter 841," is also creating dangerous conditions for the other nearby otters. People have been observed approaching other sea otters in the area in an attempt to photograph and engage with what they think could be the noto...

Revisiting the SF Bay Area Uber and Lyft Drivers Who Lived in Their Cars

26Jul

By Matt Charnock1 Comment

Culture + Travel, Editors' Picks, Hyperlocal News + Stories, News to Know

Revisiting the SF Bay Area Uber and Lyft Drivers Who Lived in Their Cars

The idea of "vehicle residency" has grown in popularity since 2015 amid rising cost-of-living expenses and inflation rates. Because owning or renting a home in 2023 still isn't a human right. The story was a part of the SF Homeless Project, a media collaboration, coordinated by the San Francisco Chronicle circa 2019, to draw attention to solutions to end the crisis; it has since been pulled from its original publisher and republished on Underscore_SF with updated information and edits; all interviews included in the piece remain original and without edits. Outside a 24 Hour Fitness in San Mateo, side-saddling a commercial office space and a tiered parking structure, a swath of strategically tinted cars sit parked, veiled by thin layers of condensation coating their windshields....

A Look Inside San Francisco’s Own Barbie Dreamhouse

24Jul

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Culture + Travel, Editors' Picks, Hyperlocal News + Stories

A Look Inside San Francisco’s Own Barbie Dreamhouse

It’s Barbie’s world, and we’re just living in it — while paying San Francisco market rents and mortgages. “Barbie” is breaking down plastic doors and glass ceilings with each passing day. Over the weekend, the film domestically grossed a staggering $155 million during its opening weekend — adding to its over $337 million global gross, as of publishing. The film has garnered widespread critical acclaim for its portrayal of gender; of queerness; of male loneliness; of radical vulnerability, femininity, and what it means to occupy the female form in a world rife with misogyny. It also has supplied us with enough pink, theater-stopping regalia to last a lifetime. (Between Taylor Swift and Beyoncé currently touring the world with shows and the domestic premiere of “Barbie,” it really is a H...

With Tony Bennett’s Passing, His San Francisco Statue Becomes a Place to Pay Homage

22Jul

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Culture + Travel, Hyperlocal News + Stories, News to Know

With Tony Bennett’s Passing, His San Francisco Statue Becomes a Place to Pay Homage

Crowds gathered outside the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, laying down flowers and playing "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" on their phones to remember the now-late singer. There are few cultural iconoclasts as interconnected with the spirit of San Francisco as tight-knit as Grammy award-winner Tony Bennett. His 1962 song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” is a celebration of San Francisco’s peculiarities, including its climate — “My love waits there in San Francisco / Above the blue and windy sea." Bennett sings about SF — “When I come home to you, San Francisco/ Your golden sun will shine for me” — in a way that makes it impossible not to wax with adoration about the seven-by-seven. When the celebrated vocalist, a singer/songwriter/multi-hyphen instrumentalist (that many youngi...

SF Street Artist fnnch Cements His Blunderous ‘Creativity’ With New Project

20Jul

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Culture + Travel, Editors' Picks, Feature Pieces

SF Street Artist fnnch Cements His Blunderous ‘Creativity’ With New Project

fnnch, who has come under fire in recent years for his gentrifying street art and invading queer spaces, has a new disputable art project: crowdsourcing funds for a piece organized around “decommodification." You’d be hard-pressed to find a piece of street art more vilified, despised, and outright loathed in San Francisco than the honey bears painted by controversial street artist fnnch. Back in 2018, when the nameless muralist started plastering his cookie-cutter, toddler-sized bears across San Francisco, locals waxed gracious and favorable when spotting them. They, too, became source material for any local journalist cutting their teeth by producing listicle pieces around lifestyle topics. (Alas, I was part of such an ostensibly destitute cohort.) Time, though, has not been kind to f...

This SF Bookstore Is Taking 40% Off Its Entire Inventory. But for a Somber Reason.

20Jul

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Culture + Travel, Hyperlocal News + Stories, News to Know

This SF Bookstore Is Taking 40% Off Its Entire Inventory. But for a Somber Reason.

San Francisco’s The Green Arcade is closing after well over a decade of bookselling — slashing everything in the store by almost half. San Francisco is home to a sea of bookstores — dozens, in fact. Though even here in San Francisco, which is largely synonymous as a bastion for literature, bookstores, especially independently-owned ones, are retreating like a low tide. In March, San Francisco was hammered with a massive blow to the city’s literary scene when two touchstones, The Magazine and Alexander Book Company, closed amid financial woes, despite increased online sales. The seven-by-seven has to contend with another biophilic gut punch after The Green Arcade announced it is closing. And it's in a hurry to clear its store of books and pageless items, throwing a “retirement” sale...

SF Bay Area Will Lose Its Only Horse Racing Track This Fall

20Jul

By Matt Charnock1 Comment

Culture + Travel, Hyperlocal News + Stories, News to Know

SF Bay Area Will Lose Its Only Horse Racing Track This Fall

Golden Gate Fields is the last remaining horse racecourse in all of Northern California. And it's closing for good this fall. It’s wild to us that horse racing is still a permissible and culturally accepted sport that oscillates around animal cruelty. Horses have pain receptors on par with those of human beings, which means they feel discomfort and pain similar to us. Thus, whippings cause these animals a measurable amount of misery — and the practice still isn’t banned, but rather just mitigated. (The Kentucky Derby, for example, limits jockeys to six whips per horse, per race.) Racing horses, too, are more likely to suffer life-ending injuries than non-racing equines; their living corridors are crammed; animals are known to endure performance drugs illegally administered by jockeys, ...

Here’s How Many People Saw the Corpse Flower in San Francisco

19Jul

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Culture + Travel, Nature + Climate Crisis

Here’s How Many People Saw the Corpse Flower in San Francisco

San Francisco's 140-year-old house of aged wood and glass recently became a national media darling after one of its corpse flowers bloomed for the first time in years. San Francisco was briefly home to one of the world’s largest blooming flowers over the 4th of July weekend. Scarlet, a massive Sumatran corpse flower that resides in the Conservatory of Flowers, blossomed on July 3rd before slowly deteriorating over the subsequent days. By July 9th, the over-six-foot-tall flower had almost entirely flopped over and dulled, losing its deep terracotta blush. During its few days of bloom — a phenomenon that only happens every few years; the last time Scarlet bloomed was in 2017 — the flower attracted thousands of visitors, creating hours-long lines that snake around the greenhouse. But just...

5 Glorious (and Evergreen) Pictures of SF’s Sutro Tower Lasers

17Jul

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Culture + Travel, Hyperlocal News + Stories

5 Glorious (and Evergreen) Pictures of SF’s Sutro Tower Lasers

It's been over a week since Sutro Tower San Francisco basically beamed like a UFO calling card. San Francisco’s on a roll with public light artwork installations. In less than a month, Illuminate — the nonprofit entity behind a roster of well-known LED and laser installations; it’s the same nonprofit behind the Bay Lights, which shuttered in March until funds can be met to update and upgrade the piece — has utilized lasers in spectacular fashions across the seven-by-seven. Collectively called “Summer of Awe,” the first act of the four-installment project featured lasers representing the colors of the rainbow, aptly called “Welcome,” shining down Market Street for SF Pride; this past weekend saw Coit Tower beamed like a multi-hued lantern — the “Candle”; and earlier this month, perh...

San Francisco Is Getting a New Very Queer Mural

16Jul

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Culture + Travel, Hyperlocal News + Stories

San Francisco Is Getting a New Very Queer Mural

Replacing the “Queeros” mural at 1800 Market Street is a new piece of wall-spanning artwork that pays homage to queer spaces and the joy that exists inside of them. There’s a reason why San Francisco is often referred to as the queer mecca of the world. Between the Castro — a fixture of the Gay Liberation movement, home to some of the oldest queer bars in the United States — and the city’s history with openly gay leaders, San Francisco and the LGBTQIA+ community are intrinsically woven together. The SF LGBT Center, one of the largest queer nonprofits and community spaces in the country, gleams along Market Street with its deep purple exterior. The building’s facade also houses one of SF’s most notable pieces of public-facing queer art: “Queeros,” a mural dedicated to both local and...