Nelson Estrada

Like many San Franciscans, we spent years convinced the world ended at the Golden Gate Bridge. We knew the 280 freeway led to Google, and heard rumors about people with yards in the East Bay, but as far as art, culture, and politics were concerned, S.F. was the place to be. But in the last few years, more and more of the cool kids have been moving across the pond to Oakland, and for good reason.

Oakland muscled in on S.F.'s cultural turf last year with the monthly street festival First Fridays. Then -- beating us at our own game -- Oakland ranked higher than San Francisco on the Advocate's list of gay-friendly cities. Here are seven reasons we should all get down in the Oaktown.

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Artist Brittany Tokyo shows off her work.

Recently, we featured a nail art and jewelry show with the headline, Get a Free Hand Job in the Mission. And while we might have had a little fun with puns and a collective snicker at the show's title -- "Hand Jobs" -- we can assure you that the art on display was no joke. The show was -- hands down -- the best nail art we'd ever seen.

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Jonathan Curiel

Born and raised in San Francisco, Apex has been doing street art since 1992, when he was just 14. Now, at age 34, he's one of San Francisco's veteran practitioners -- someone whose spray-paintings are instantly recognizable. Loops, lines, and half-circles converge into a nucleus, which often splits apart at the outer edges. With bold colors, and intricate shading and paint strokes -- like that of an Impressionist painter -- Apex's creations stand out from outdoor walls around San Francisco, and also at 941Geary gallery in an exhibit called "Reflected" that continues until January 5.

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Fabric8

Mission District gallery Fabric8 will emerge with a new identity next year.

Fabric8 started in 1995 as an online clothing store and became a physical business in 2006, a lovely space that encompasses clothing, art, a sculpture garden, a public parklet (which recently got a newly designed installation thanks to Kickstarter support), and an informal forum for fledgling food businesses to try out their ideas. The next group show, "A Plethora of Enchanted Delights," which runs from Dec. 8-Jan. 14, will be the last held under the Fabric 8 moniker.

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Shadowplay, by Greg Trefry & Gigantic Mechanic

In 2006, over 1,000 players, ranging in age from 10 to "don't ask," gathered in New York for the inaugural Come Out & Play festival. Competitors roamed the city, playing Space Invaders projected on buildings in Chelsea, putting rounds of mini-golf in Tompkins Square, and evading zombies in Chinatown. The following year, Come Out & Play went to Amsterdam.

It wasn't until 2011 that the festival finally arrived in the city voted most likely to transform itself into a giant living game board. It went very well, as you can imagine. So this year, Come Out & Play lasts a full month.

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I've always wanted to be a secret agent. The sneaking around, the mysterious assassinations, the beautiful women; it all looks so easy in the movies. The only bummer is how all of those covert operations start at the crack of dawn -- when my alarm goes off at 4 a.m., the only thing I want to assassinate is the clock. I was thinking about all of this on a recent Sunday while sitting in my car outside of Golden Gate Park at 5 a.m. I had dragged myself up with coffee and a Clif bar to meet classically trained actor and all around clown Jon Deline for a renegade art installation at the de Young Museum. When I saw a minivan with a missing headlight pull up, I knew it had to be him. Jon's brother came along to help out, and the three of us looked like friendly ninjas in our all black clothing.

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This is President Obama, obviously

We get a lot of e-mails at SF Weekly, some delightful, some boring, and some that are downright baffling. Jonathon Keats' Epigenetic Cloning Agency falls into the latter camp, promising to duplicate famous people, including Barack Obama, Lady Gaga, and Jesus Christ. Which raises the question: What?

This isn't the first time Keats, an experimental philosopher and artist, has turned art and science on its head. He opened a photosynthetic restaurant for plants, exhibited extraterrestrial abstract art, and presented the nation's first Ouija voting booth in Berkeley, so it's not surprising that he's attempting to genetically engineer God. Still: What?

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Quin de Varona

This might be called the Era of Manic Juxtaposition. Every premise seems to want to pack it all in. It's a culture designed by MadLibs: "This movie is about Abraham Lincoln (noun) and vampires (noun)." "This machine is a phone (noun) that can check e-mail (action), recommend Thai restaurants (action), and find public nudity (San Francisco action)."

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Andrew McClintock

After a half a decade hiatus, local favorite Two Gallants is back and slated to release a new album Sept. 4. But the duo's drummer Tyson Vogel hasn't spent those six years drinking Mai Tais on a tropical beach. Instead, he's retrenched in San Francisco and expanded his artistic scope considerably. In addition to releasing the solo record Devotionals, Vogel is composing a series of sound installations during his bi-yearly residency at Ever Gold Gallery.

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Lee Miller died of cancer, overweight, alcoholic, ravaged by depression, and tortured by her husband's affair with a trapeze artist. Anyone meeting Lee Miller then would have been surprised to know that she was once considered the most beautiful woman in the world, second only to Greta Garbo. A former Vogue model and muse/lover to Man Ray, Miller was also famous for cavorting in Hitler's bathtub.

Courtesy of the Legion of Honor

These tragic details are not in evidence at the "Man Ray | Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism" exhibit currently at the Legion of Honor. What is discussed is her struggle to be an artist in her own right. As a photographer she helped discover the Sabatier Effect, a process of development that edges out the lines of the subject in ethereal shadows. According to her, it was an accidental discovery caused by a mouse running over her foot in the dark room. She was an artist and also a photo journalist. She was the only woman allowed to be a combat photographer during WWII. She is quoted as saying to a reporter, "It seems to me that women have a bigger chance at success in photography than men ... Women are quicker and more adaptable than men. And I think they have an intuition that helps them understand personalities more quickly than men."

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