Try This Ida Lupino Noir Bar Cocktail

“Noir City-Face the Music” is in full swing at the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland as the launch of its eight city tour.

Eddie Muller—host of TCM’s Noir Alley, one of the world’s leading authorities on film noir, and cocktail connoisseur—takes film buffs and drinks enthusiasts alike on a spirited tour through the “dark city” of film noir in this stylish book packed with equal parts great cocktail recipes and noir lore. Continue reading

Noir City 23 to The Rescue!

Anticipating This Year’s Music-Themed Fest With Delight

by Meredith Brody.  (January 13,2026)

I love Eddie Muller’s Noir City film festivals; I don’t think I’ve missed a one since his first edition in Los Angeles at the American Cinematheque in 1999, four years before SF’s first Noir City.

I start out perusing the list of 24 films (paired in a dozen double bills) in my usual somewhat-blinkered and mildly narcissistic fashion: which ones are new to me? Since I’ve been seeking out film noir since before I went to college, and my first post-college publication in book form was in Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward’s first “Encyclopedia of Film Noir” back in 1979, it’s not totally a surprise that there are only two that qualify: the British Face the Music aka The Deadly Glove (1954), and The Crimson Canary (1945), neither of which I’ve even heard of.

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‘Reflections’ of Diana Ross: Through the Mirror of My Mind

By Noma Faingold  (August 13, 2025)

Diane Ross will be appearing at San Francisco’s Stern Grove on Sunday, August 17, 2025 in a free afternoon concert. While sold out, 1000 tickets will be given away Friday at 5pm. See bottom of this article for details.

The family hi-fi set-up, anchored by two giant hidden speakers, was located in the dining room. We never ate there unless we had company. No one who came to the house knew where the speakers were because the beige tweed fabric covering them matched the adjacent drapes.

The first Diana Ross album I bought was simply titled, “Diana Ross.” The 1970 release was her debut solo record. I was in second grade and my musical taste was already firmly established. I gravitated to the slick soul of Motown – artists like The Jackson 5, The Temptations, Stevie Wonder and especially Ross, as opposed to popular hardcore rock bands of the time, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin.

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SANTOS: Skin to Skin

By Gaetano Kazuo Maida

October 16, 2022

“The drum is like a heartbeat.” —John Santos

I grew up in the Bronx in the ‘50s. This was in an old Italian neighborhood, full of grape arbors and fig trees (even a goat!), but by the time I was eight our neighbors on one side and across the street were from Puerto Rico, and on the other side were African Americans; it’s mostly Caribbean now. My public school was a ten block walk from home and most of my classmates there were Jewish. My parents were a mixed couple (Japanese/Sicilian) and most of their friends were mixed in one way or another as well, so I had a strong sense of a wonderfully polyglot community that ill-prepared me for the rather homogeneous and affluent population of my elite public high school. But it did open my ears to a wide variety of music. The soundtrack at home was folk, blues, soul (long story), flamenco, and opera, but in the streets it was doo-wop and Afro-Caribbean.

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