San Francisco’s Mission District: Eclectic, Eccentric, Electric

November 20, 2005

FROM the rooftop patio of Medjool, a new restaurant in the Mission district of San Francisco, the entire neighborhood is laid out like a flamboyant mosaic. Ranks of painted ladies – San Francisco’s ornate wooden Victorians – rise to Twin Peaks in the west, the hills that block the city’s infamous fog and make the Mission one of the city’s warmest and sunniest neighborhoods. This terrace is the perfect spot for watching the cottony wave of evening fog roll into downtown, for the sky in the Mission remains crystalline. (more…)

Posted in New York Times, Newspapers

Moby, Teany, and the Meaning of Life

August 2005

Moby is the very portrait of successful idiosyncrasy. Best known as an eclectic musician—his work has ranged from hard-edged punk rock to electronic dance music to pop ballads to ambient experiments—Moby is so much more. He’s a businessman (Teany, his New York teahouse, opened in 2002), and an artist (he is part of the Little Idiot, a collective of illustrators). But the reason he is a perennial favorite among Vegnews readers (who voted Moby “Favorite Musician” for the past two years) is because of his activism. (more…)

Posted in Magazines, VegNews

Schadenfreude

June 2005

Schadenfreude. Sha. Den. Froy. Duh. It hardly trips off the tongue, and that’s part of the point. Translated damagejoy, it was up to our friends in Germany—connoisseurs of suffering with wry wit–to cast this lexical spell. (Maybe it’s the long winters.) A single unified morsel of horrible, delicious pleasure, Schadenfreude is at once a dark threat to society and an essential mechanism for keeping it moving along in the face of the pointless absurdity and pain of existence. (more…)

Posted in Magazines, Other Magazine