Marigold Project

The Mexican holiday Día de los Muertos is something of a cross-cultural collaboration. While the Aztecs used their summer month of Miccailhuitontli to celebrate dead children, fallen warriors, and other ancestors, the Spaniards brought the Roman Catholic All Soul's Day with them in the 16th century.

Eventually the two holidays merged -- the Spanish influence pushed the celebration into the fall, but it retained the rituals of the indigenous tradition. Here in San Francisco, our own Day of the Dead festivities draw from two distinct cultures as well. Each year, the city's artistic types come out in style alongside the Mission District's Latino community to celebrate those that have passed from this world.

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Tacos, LSD, and Jesus: The Stranger vs. The Believer Storytelling

Books for Surviving the Impending Apocalypse

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We've heard lore of bamboo forests and sun decks in the otherwise inhospitable downtown San Francisco, but when we endeavor to visit such mythical places, it always ends the same way: we can't find the exact location, or a menacing security guard prompts us to quickly turn away. Surely all the good worker bees should just continue hunching in front of the computer during lunch because that's the only option, right?

Wrong. Since 1985, this fine city has required developers to provide one square foot of public space for every 50 square feet of office space, known as POPOS or privately owned public spaces. How do you find POPOS? Developers aren't keen on making it easy. Bad signage or front desk inquiries are de rigueur, the nonprofit urban think tank SPUR noted in their 2009 report, but they've been on the case ever since,  and this month they've released a new app which promises to radically alter your lunch hour. S.F.'s Secret Spaces and Hidden Oases identifies over 50 POPOS on a map, as well as hours of operations and tricks to getting to where you want to go, whether it is a five-story atrium or a sculpture garden.

We combed the app to bring you the top 10 gems hidden in plain sight in downtown S.F.

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San Francisco's Top 10 Offbeat Museums

The Haas-Lilienthal House Declared a National Treasure

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Calling all Instagram lovers, which judging from my Facebook feed, is everyone and their mom's dog.

Show off your badass tilt and shift skills with this contest that also celebrates local artists and studios. Part of the month-long SF Open Studios event, the San Francisco Travel Association (our official tourism org. Did you know we had one?) wants to encourage your support of the arts through self-guided tours and Instagram photos. Here's the skinny:

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We're big proponents of non-corporate, revelatory tourism -- the kind that's interesting to both outsiders and locals who've lived in San Francisco for years. Many of S.F.'s secrets lie in the changing landscape it was built on, the patterns of which are still evident in the city's physical shape. As part of the "Performing Community" project this month, SOMArts and SF Camerawork put together Dunes, Trains, and Beer: The Buried History of SoMa, a neighborhood walking tour that explores its buried history.

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The day of Beckoning (cat) is at hand!

We've all seen the (Japanese) "Beckoning Cat" Maneki-neko that has a popular presence in Chinese businesses, but have you also noticed the prevalence of real cats straight chillin' at every dim sum joint and non-touristy dive bar in Chinatown? The last time I met one of these elusive kitties, I asked the owner if she was his, only to find out that most of these eerily all-knowing felines are neighborhood pets and strays that restaurant owners don't mind keeping around. But everyone loves kitties, don't they? I'm certainly not the only one who's friends with C.A.A. (Cat Addicts Anony-mouse) on Facebook. And yet no other neighborhood consistently offers me the company of a cat. Why are the alleyways and bun bakeries in Chinatown so willing to let our furry friends hang around?

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Benjamin Coopersmith

Composer, writer, and filmmaker Jack Curtis Dubowsky has scored five feature films, and directed several shorts. But now he's ventured into feature-length territory with his first  documentary film, Submerged Queer Spaces, a study of San Francisco's queer history through architecture and urban archaeology, which premieres at this year's LGBT Film Festival, Frameline36. Dubowsky will be a big presence at the festival, with a walking tour of spaces highlighted in the film and and his choral work, Harvey Milk: A Cantata, featuring unpublished texts by Milk.

Dubowsky told us about finding interview subjects who were going out in San Francisco in the '40s, the effect architecture has on our lives, and the importance of getting out in the world and talking to people.

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Tourists in San Francisco surely have taken, collectively, tens of millions of photos of the city -- especially its most tourist-laden areas such as the cable cars and Fisherman's Wharf. And in the background of many of these photos exists the Everywhere Man, a man of mystery whose face is always obscured but whose presence -- once noticed -- is everywhere.

Once you've discovered he's out there, the search for his identity begins. Here to guide you rookie detectives through the process are the folks at Invisible City Audio Tours, who -- as part of Litquake 2011 -- and their third self-guided audio tour, Everywhere Man.

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Last night at 18th and Valencia streets we spotted this thoughtful critique of House Speaker John Boehner.

His dialogue comes from the Buffalo Bill character in Silence of the Lambs. It's fun to work out what exactly that might mean: Perhaps the artist intends Boehner as Bill, the American public as the girl in the pit, and the truth as the penis he hides between his legs?

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Upper Haight stencil by local artist Get Up

​No matter how cool you are, there's still a good chance that the only thing you know about street art is sometimes you come across it, and sometimes it's amazing. Who did it? What's behind it? Where can you see more? Who knows?

We do. Or, we know who knows: stencil artist Russell Howze. He's the author of Stencil Nation, and he offers a three-hour, small-group tour Scout for Street Art. Howze started giving these tours two weeks ago, and promises to provide "expert explanations, stories, and background for most of the art that constantly changes on the streets." And he's not joking about the "expert" part.

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Local historian Chris Carlsson loves San Francisco, and has spent a long time studying it. At this point, he knows so much awesome stuff about the city, he wants to tell you about it! And show it to you!

He's most interested in times and places people have been hella into equality -- they're the ones who made us famous for being freak-flag fliers, or dirty hippies, or the city that'll protest anything, or gaytown, or name your reason you like it here. Murals, divine food, clean air and water, Pride -- a lot of it came from work done in the years between 1968 and 1978, by young people in bellbottom pants and long hair. Carlsson's new anthology, Ten Years that Shook the City, tells those stories, and today is the first day to take his walking tour. Using QR-code-enabled plaques and your smartphone at 24 locations, the tour lets you walk around and listen to what was up back then. Here are some pictures of what was up back then; we hope they freak you out in a groovy way.

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