This week's new articles from the alternative weeklies...
- How Chris Daly saved San Francisco from a bad America's Cup deal (SF Weekly)
...Daly's true goodbye gift to this city — apart from inspiring a Donkey Kong revival — was countering former Mayor Gavin Newsom's Ahab-like drive to land the America's Cup and ram through a high-priced deal before decamping to his new job in Sacramento.
In doing so, Daly undermined an inferior pact centered on Pier 50, adjacent to AT&T Park on the central waterfront. Upfront city losses alone on that deal were subsequently pegged at some $58 million, with nearly that much again probably gone over the coming decades via land giveaways. Full article - The Bingo Kingpin (East Bay Express)
... At the Gilman Street Bingo Hall in Berkeley, gross revenues exceeded $5.6 million in 2009. However, almost none of that money ever went to charitable causes. Most of it —$4.9 million — ended up in players' pockets in the form of cash prizes. Nearly all of the rest went to so-called "overhead" costs that may have been nothing more than profit-taking. Full article
- Short takes on Indiefest '11 (San Francisco Bay Guardian)
What to see at the always fiesty film fest? From est to the Ugliest Dog in the World, our writers screen a gaggle of independent offerings on a world of subjects Full article
- Robert Mapplethorpe: Portraits (Metro Silicon Valley)
With its new show, "Robert Mapplethorpe: Portraits" (traveling from the Palm Springs Art Museum), the San Jose Museum of Art deploys to perfection its well-designed gallery space in presenting this sequence of images in a syncopation that draws the viewer into one work and then along from portrait to portrait in an ever-deepening appreciation. Despite the consistency of size, tone and composition, each is a singular biography. In totality, "Portraits" illuminates a time and a place—and the man behind the camera. Full article