Less than a month after local writer-activist Stephen Elliott began organizing a campaign against a proposed American Apparel store on Valencia St., the San Francisco Planning Commission denied a permit to the controversial clothing manufacturer-retailer.

The vote by the commission was 7-0, the Stop American Apparel website reported.

Update: Elliott, who was in New York last night promoting his new online magazine The Rumpus, blogged about the commission’s vote and his efforts.

Reader Alex Beckstead just left a comment on this announcement from last month about author Lawrence Lessig, who appeared at the Booksmith to talk about his book Remix. The comment points us to this 3–part video interview (there’s also a 1-minute trailer on the page) in which Lessig discusses the main arguments of his book, makes allusion to his appearance on the Colbert Report, and outlines his future work: he plans to move out of copyright law and begin a serious examination of institutional corruption. Total running time: 23 minutes.

Five years ago, the book Moneyball by Michael Lewis looked at the career of Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane and how he consistently managed to field a competitive team in one of the smallest team markets by drafting for certain types of impact players, as measured by statistics.

Now Stephen Soderburgh has signed to direct a film of the book, and Brad Pitt has signed to play the A’s GM.

Here’s Beane on the left, the other guy on the right:

[R to L: festival poster, Super Happy Fun Monkeybash!, and Abraham Obama.]

It’s hard to know where to start with an event as huge and as rich as the 11th Annual San Francisco Independent Film Festival, better known as IndieFest, which brings 15 days of first-rate independent film to the Roxie & the Victoria on 16th Street here, and the Shattuck Cinema in Berkeley. Over one hundred features and shorts are on offer, and every single one of them was independently produced. And if that’s not enough for you, there are at least four official parties you can attend as well (see below).

The festival opens at the Victoria tonight with Somers Town (at 7:15), a gritty but humorous black-and-white drama from acclaimed British director Shane Meadows. It’s a story about Tomo (played by Thomas Turgoose), a 16-year old runaway from the Midlands who ends up in the London suburb the film is named for. There he encounters another equally lonely boy, Marek (Piotr Jagiello): a Polish transplant who has just arrived in town with his hard-drinking father. The film is about the bond these two boys form, and the acting is such that both kids won Best Actor prizes at last year’s Tribeca film festival.

No opening night would be complete without a good party after the screening, and this one is being held at CellSpace (Bryant at 18th) with live performances from the Extra Action Marching Band and Live Evil. Admission is free with your ticket stub. Otherwise it’s $10 — $5 in costume. While you’re on that page, check out the other IndieFest parties CellSpace will be hosting, including the Grease-themed wrap party — it’s a sock hop! — a Big Lebowski party, and a Roller Disco party.

But if all that partying sounds too exhausting for you, tonight you can stay put at the Victoria for another film: Fanboys, a madcap story about a group of friends who hatch a plot to break into Skywalker Ranch in order to steal a print of the (then-unreleased) Star Wars: Episode 1. It features cameos by Carrie Fisher, The Shatner, and many, many others. Check out the trailer behind that link for a good idea of what the film’s like.

Closing night, which is on February 22^nd at the Shattuck Cinema, features the Cronenberg-eqsue Deadgirl, which proves that no coming-of-age story should be considered complete without a gorgeous undead babe to shake things up. Actually, it looks pretty creepy; watch the trailer behind that link!

In between there are many other highlights, some of which I’ll be writing more about in the days to come: Abraham Obama, the story of Ron English’s famous wheatpaste; Let Them Know, the story of Youth Brigade and BYO Records; Harrison Montgomery, a drama set in the Tenderloin; Super Happy Fun Monkeybash!, a 90–minute compilation of Japanese TV zaniness; and The Achievers, which does for fans of The Big Lebowski what Trekkies did for — well — Trekkies.

And I expect to write about some films that I haven’t even mentioned yet. The festival is just that packed.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Festival website here. Ticket prices: opening night $20 (including party); most events $10 in advance, $11 at the box office. Five-film passes $45, ten-film passes $85. Festival pass good for all films and parties, $200. Most shows are at either the Roxie or Victoria Theatres, each within two blocks of the 16 Street Mission BART station; the Shattuck Cinema is one block south of the Downtown Berkeley BART station.

Along with burning portapotties, there’s another stinky & troublesome condition in urban life, the trash pile-up.

I live in an apartment building. My neighbor notices that when she throws trash down on the weekend, it piles up in the dumpster. She has to go down to the garage and shuffle around the bags to make sure none of it falls out and breaks on the floor.

The situation is that the weekend trash guys don’t empty the dumpsters. They take an empty recycling container, put a few bags in it, and wheel that out of the garage.

I have video of this occurring, but I’m worried that if I post the footage, garbage guys will know which building, and we’ll *never* get our trash picked up. Our recourse? Pretty much none. It’s a 1-trash-company-town.

Time to air some dirty laundry- do you have any gripes with the trash guys?

North Face packaging. Nature’s Gate shampoo bottles. The Prismacolor box. Chances are, you’re already familiar with these items, among many others on display in San Francisco Graphic Design, an exhibit running through April 26^th at the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design (500 Sutter Street). Although you’ve seen these items, and they’ve probably touched your life, you may not know that they were all designed by individuals and firms right here in the Bay Area. From 6 to 8 tomorrow evening, curator Michael Osborne will give a public walk-through of this great show.

During a similar press tour given one week after the opening, Osborne told me that one of his goals with the show was “simply to show people the wide range of everyday products with extraordinary design that they know, but which they might not necessarily know was done here.” To that end, the show begins with a timeline on one wall near the entrance, presenting a history of local graphic design, featuring iconic images that have been produced here, such as the 1969 Gap logo.

However, the show is much more than a greatest-hits parade of Bay Area design. Out of approximately 1,400 graphic designers active in the Bay Area right now, Osborne selected 13 to be specially featured with large displays. His goal with these designers was to show work that is “slightly under the radar.”

Those two goals — demonstrating the ubiquity of extraordinary design from the Bay Area on the one hand, and bringing to the surface work that few are aware of on the other — don’t conflict as much as one might think. For example, few objects are more familiar in kitchens and sitting rooms throughout the Bay Area than the titles published by Chronicle Books. If you’ve spent any time in the cookbook section of a bookstore lately, you’ve undoubtedly seen books like The Country Cooking of France and Simply Organic on the shelf, or maybe you’ve seen the Rex Ray titles in the art section. But it’s likely you’ve never heard of their designer, Sara Schneider, who is the publisher’s in-house design director. The display devoted to her work is even set up like a bookstore, with a chair nearby and a reading light — strictly notional, at 40 watts — hanging above it. I was told that visitors to the museum are invited to sit down and pull a book off the shelf for browsing. I highly recommend you take a good look at Love Hotels: The Hidden Fantasy Rooms of Japan.

Osborne is a good choice to put together just such a show. A noted designer in his own right, he founded his own firm, Michael Osborne Design, Inc. in 1981, and he has designed quite a number of things you’ll probably recognize, not only Prismacolor’s packaging, but also a number of stamps for the USPS: the 2002 and 2004 Love stamps, the 2006 Wedding Stamp set, the 2006 Madonna and Child stamp, and the 2007 Patriotic Banner Stamp.

Osborne said that although his selection is representative of the Bay Area design community, it does not provide an exact mirror image. For one thing, although women are outnumbered in the field at large, this show presents nearly a 50–50 split. And because one of his objects was to inspire students just getting into design, he chose to place a heavy emphasis on the work of designers who are now in the prime of their careers, along with three relative newcomers to keep things fresh.

Two of those relative newcomers are Adam Brodsley and Eric Heiman of Volume Inc, whose work you may recognize from the 2008 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival materials or from the ReadyMade book. (They like yellow. A lot.) The other designers and firms featured in the show are Philippe Becker (Philippe Becker Design, which did the Nature’s Gate design), Josh Chen (Chen Design Associates, which did the North Face packaging), Barbara Vick (Barbara Vick Design), Tom Ingalls (Ingalls Design), Jennifer Jerde (Elixir Design), Mitchell Mauk (Mauk Design), Jennifer Bostic (Paper Plane Studio), Michael Schwab (Michael Schwab Studio), Christopher Simmons (MINE), and Cinthia Wen (NOON).

One of the most intriguing portions of the exhibit was a wall consisting of large, square shopping bags, each one designed by a different individual in the show. Osborne gave them a simple task: use only black and white, and put a statement on the bag that summarizes your approach to design. Perhaps because designers are not necessarily verbally-oriented, the assignment turned out to be more daunting than he supposed, and the display turned out to be the most difficult one to curate in the whole show. However, the effort was worth it: the arrangement of the bags, with all their bold text — advice on how to live and how to design — is really striking where it’s placed, against a back wall between two riotously colorful and busy walls, and it serves as a nice summary of the show itself, as it brings all the designers, with their disparate viewpoints and approaches, together to be appreciated in a single glance.

Plum trees, planted on sidewalks and in landscaped areas, are starting to bloom in San Francisco. I took this shot early this morning on Mariposa St. outside St. Gregory Nyssa church. Prunus cerasifera, known as the cherry plum or purple-leafed plum, can be seen throughout the city, many of them planted by Friends of the Urban Forest or by CalTrans.

San Francisco Metblogs has joined everyone else in 2007 and created a Twitter account. Follow http://twitter.com/sfmetblogs. If you don’t have an account, it’s super easy to create one. Also be sure to checkout who SFMetblogs follows for more awesome info about the city by the bay. <3

Note: cappuccino at Tosca, has no coffee in it, but very tasty.

Thanks for the link to Richard Walker via FriendFeed

I received this very official-looking document in the mail today. And I’m used to getting official-looking mailers that purport to be sweepstakes prizes, fake checks, and so on, but it took me ten hard seconds of looking at this thing to determine it’s a total scam — and a particularly evil one. (Click on the image to see the whole thing, with my personal information blocked out.)

See this page and this news story, which comments on the scam. They’re talking about the exact same letter I received.

I called the San Francisco Assessor’s office, and they said anyone can request a reassessment for free. There’s no need to use this “service.”

Update: A Fresno TV station did a story tonight on the deceptive letters.