• A driver was killed Tuesday morning after crashing a speeding Toyota RAV4 into multiple parked Caltrans vehicles near the San Mateo Toll Bridge Plaza, prompting a CHP investigation and a three-hour shutdown of eastbound SR-92 lanes. Authorities say the SUV veered off the road into a Department of Transportation lot for reasons still under investigation. [KRON4]
• A Twin Peaks condo once home to disco legend Sylvester is on the market for $1.7 million. Neighbors remember the late icon as an unforgettable presence in the community. [SFGate]
• The embattled Antioch Police Department has sworn in Joe Vigil as its new permanent chief, marking a “new chapter” focused on accountability and reform following scandals involving officer misconduct, civil rights violations, and corruption. Vigil brings 25 years of law enforcement experience and aims to restore community trust after FBI investigations exposed widespread abuses within the department. [KRON4]
• Salesforce is acquiring cloud data management firm Informatica in an all-cash, $8 billion deal approved by both companies’ boards, aiming to enhance its AI and data capabilities across sectors like healthcare and finance, with the deal expected to close in early fiscal 2027. [NBC Bay Area]
• The Berkeley Flea Market, a 50-year-old institution at the Ashby BART station, may close by June 28 due to ongoing financial losses and declining vendor participation, according to flyers distributed by market staff. [NBC Bay Area]

National:

• The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from Apache Stronghold seeking to block a copper mine on Oak Flat, a sacred site in Arizona, effectively allowing the land transfer to Resolution Copper to proceed. Justices Gorsuch and Thomas dissented, calling the refusal a “grave mistake” that disregards the Apaches’ religious freedoms and the cultural significance of the land. [CBS News]
• NPR and three Colorado public radio stations have filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration, challenging an executive order that bars federal funding to NPR and PBS based on alleged bias, arguing it violates the First Amendment. The suit accuses the administration of retaliatory censorship and usurping Congress’s authority over funding decisions, threatening public media’s ability to provide independent news. [NPR]
• The U.S. State Department has temporarily paused scheduling new visa interviews for foreign students while expanding social media screening, a move that could delay enrollments and impact universities relying on international students. [Associated Press]

Video of the Day:

• Stunning footage by photographer Eric Thurber of some of the dancers who performed in last Sunday’s Carnaval parade:

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Image: Leanne Maxwell/SFist

Everything all summer long in SF continues to officially be "hippie" themed because it's the 50th anniversary of the famed Summer of Love — and if you haven't been already you should be wearing flowers in your hair and remembering it fondly.

PBS's American Experience: Summer of Love offers a look not only at the gorgeous and stoned hippies basking in the Golden Gate Park sun, but also of the uptight bespeckled squares who've paid for a tour to gawk at them, and the angry middle class San Franciscans who were getting squeezed off of sidewalks and busses.

The Summer of Love, while a defining moment for our city, was also kind of a nightmare just because of the sheer influx of humanity. As one talking head in the doc puts it, "It got ugly. And the original people who came there for peace and love left."

And as one San Francisco marm describes the hippies, "I don't like their morals... I don't like to look at them. I don't like the sound of their voices or the filthy words they use."

But some people arrived in San Francisco not to participate in any be-ins, but just to take in the show. In the cued-up clip above, a 1967 Gray Line bus tour went so far as to offer bemused patrons a hippie slang dictionary and leisurely drive down Haight Street before swinging them back to earth with a visit to the Japanese Tea Garden.

PBS will re-air The Summer of Love on Tuesday, July 25 at 8 p.m., but the full documentary (which first aired a decade ago, in 2007) can be seen below via YouTube.

Fun fact: My uncle was a tunic-clad Summer of Love hippie and claims his friends used to hold giant mirrors up as the tour busses passed so tourists could see the real freaks — themselves.

h/t: Time

Related: What Was The Summer Of Love?: An Explainer As 50th Anniversary Celebrations Ramp Up

A documentary that's been on the festival circuit but hasn't yet premiered to the general public, Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise might, as the New York Times points out, "seem redundant to those who’ve read her autobiographies, notably I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings."

Nevertheless, "the photographs and film footage here add another dimension to her stories, as do interviews with her son" and artists who worked with her, the Times goes on. In particular, documentary directors Bob Hercules and Rita Coburn Whack, who began this portrait of Angelou before her death in 2014, linger on moments those less familiar with Angelou may have glossed over: Her acting, and yes, singing ability, for example.

The documentary about Angelou, "a redwood tree," as the quote goes, "with deep roots in American culture,” might have particular resonance with those of us in San Francisco, as some of those roots can be traced back to the ground here.

You can learn more about the film here from PBS. The film premiers with KQED on Channel 9 this evening at 8 p.m.

Finally, a little extra on Angelou's encounter with another, if vastly different, Bay Area-born poet.

Related: How Maya Angelou Became San Francisco's First African-American Female Streetcar Conductor

The Anthony Bourdain-produced PBS series The Mind of a Chef, which already has a James Beard Award, just took home a Daytime Emmy Award in the category of Outstanding Culinary Host, which went to co-hosts of the show Gabrielle Hamilton (of NY's Prune) and our very own David Kinch (Manresa, The Bywater), as Eater reports.

The show launched in 2012 with different chef hosts each season visiting the kitchens of other chefs and exploring various themes around food. Season 4, which began airing in late 2015, is hosted by Kinch and Hamilton, and features the episode above centered on the topic of fire — something Kinch knows all too well about after Manresa suffered a devastating fire two summers ago.

And this means that Kinch might be the first BEMC (BEMiC?) — the culinary version of an EGOT, in that he has a James Beard Award, an Emmy, three Michelin stars, and four Chronicle stars. And if we wanted to take the Chronicle out of that equation as being too local, we could add in the annual San Pellegrino Top 50 Restaurants in the world, where Manresa, while not in the top 50, made it into the Top 100 at the #100 spot in 2015.

"It had been a bad trip … fast and wild in some moments, slow and dirty in others, but on balance it looked like a bummer."

That's how Hunter Thompson concludes his time embedded with the Hell's Angel in his career-launching 1967 book, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. The work, an investigation of the counterculture after World War II, grew out of an article reported for The Nation in 1965.

"On my way back to San Francisco, I tried to compose a fitting epitaph," Thompson continued. "I wanted something original, but there was no escaping the echo of Mistah Kurtz’ final words from the Heart of Darkness: 'The horror! The horror! … Exterminate all the brutes!'"

Giving words like those some much needed levity, nonprofit studio Blank on Blank compiled several archival interviews with Thompson about the outlaw gangs, expertly cutting and animating them for a series produced in collaboration with PBS Digital Studios. Have a look.

Thompson spent a year on and off the road with the Angels' San Francisco and Oakland chapters and their president Ralph "Sonny" Barger. He was introduced by Birney Jarvis, a former club member turned police-beat San Francisco Chronicle reporter. Thompson actively participated in the Angels' debauched episodes, with the gang frequently crashing his San Francisco apartment at 318 Parnassus Avenue to terrify his neighbors.

Thompson often joked about violence with the members of the Hell's Angels, saying he would kill them before they could kill him. But, as mentioned in the animation, the writer did receive a brutal "stomping" that soured his relationship with the group.

"Only a punk beats his wife," the reporter told a Hell's Angel who was doing just that, incurring a beating himself.

In a television interview with Thompson and another Angel, the same subject comes up, but fortunately — perhaps thanks to the cameras — no "stomping" takes place.

Related: Learning To Drink Vol. 16: The Mint Julep Is Decadent And Depraved

Everything But The News is a news parody show, similar to The Daily Show, but with more PBS-focused jokes. In it, freelance reporter/out and proud Canadian Steve Goldbloom ventures throughout the Bay Area to get the word on the latest and greatest in tech. He's funny. The show, thus far, is funny. And they just did this report on San Francisco ridesharing.

Behold:

Delightful. Look for it each Wednesday.

(And on a personal note to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick: Don't wear flip flops to the office/ever. It's the passive-aggressive form of wearing a hoodie. I say that not out of ire toward you, but out of caring too much. Should the mood strike, the Sak's for Men Store has a wonderful selection of nifty shoes for men. Men just like you. You're welcome.)

Oh boy, do we have a bushel of questions for America's Test Kitchen host Christopher Kimball. Like: who do you like better, Bridget Lancaster or Julia Collin-Davison? (We cannot decide!) What's the deal with the whole Vermont thing? Do you hate Good Eats since you both more or less do similar things? Why are you wasting our time with the equipment corner? And, why do you fumble on the taste-test challenge? You seem actually peeved when you pick the wrong one. Which you do. Often. And that tickles us.

You can meet Kimball on October 22 at Omnivore Books (3885 Cesar Chavez) when he celebrate 20 years of Cook's Illustrated magazine and the publication of The Cook's Illustrated Cookbook. (We highly recommend subscribing to Cook's Illustrated if you haven't done so already. Gorgeous publication, people.)

What: Meet America's Test Kitchen's Christopher Kimball
When: October 22
Time: 3 pm
Where: Omnivore Books, 3885 Cesar Chavez (at Church), S.F.
415-282-4712

Serialized gem / siren song Tales of the City drew many folks to SF. Well, it brought us here, anyway. And the character of Mary Ann Singleton acted as a temporary stand-in until many of us arrived. To wit:

Mary Ann Singleton was twenty-five years old when she saw San Francisco for the first time. She came to the city alone for an eight-day vacation. On the fifth night, she drank three Irish coffees at the Buena Vista, realized that her Mood Ring was blue and decided to phone her mother in Cleveland.

(This Cleveland place is somewhere in So Cal, right?)

Laura Linney brought Singleton to life with brilliance and wide-eyed, no-so plain Jane beauty in the '90s PBS and Showtime mini-series Tales of the City. Next week she will help celebrate Tales' 31 years along with a local literary lineup of such talented key tappers as Amy Tan, Andrew Sean Greer, Michelle Tea, K.M. Soehnlein, Susie Bright, and...Father Guido Sarducci . Litquake will fete the anniversary of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City with a reading by Laura Linney and the aforementioned. You hear that? That's (almost) Oscar-gold talent, folks. Drink it in. (Also, someone named Eve Batey will host one of the pub crawls. Get blackout drunk at her crawl, and win a prize!)

The first, and best, is Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple. Through interviews with former members and survivors of the Jim Jones cult, along with loads of archival footage, you get an eerie portrait of a good idea gone bad. In hindsight, it's hard to imagine how anyone could have fallen under the spell of Jim Jones, he of the questionable jet-black hair and sideburns, ever present sunglasses, tacky leisure suits and, more importantly, bombastic personality.

But by listening to some of the cult's members, you can understand how the Peoples Temple--which actually began in the 1950s--latched on to the dying hippie ideals of the 1960s and 70s, and the people who held on to those ideals; things like racial equality for all, caring for ones elders, and self-sustaining communities all sound like great ideas. But the church was being run by a lunatic, and it is incredibly sad and horrifying how many people lost their lives because they didn't realize how insane Jones was until it was way too late.

Slightly less engrossing is Summer of Love, which focuses on that historical summer of 1967 in San Francisco. Perhaps it's just because having grown up here, we've heard enough about the summer of love--and have stumbled over enough burnouts from said summer on Haight Street--that the nostalgia factor didn't really hit us. But the documentary did make us realize that while many consider the "Summer of Love" the beginning of the whole hippie thing, it was really the beginning of the end of it, and peace and love would never be the same again. Some of the summer's participants interviewed include Peter Coyote, Joel Selvin, Peter Berg, and Judy Goldhaft.

Jonestown airs Sunday the 26th at 8 p.m. on KRCB channel 22.

Summer of Love airs Sunday at 9 p.m. and 2 a.m. on KCSM channel 17.

"I smoke grass," was the shocking line uttered by precocious 4-year-old Sean from Ralph Arlyck's 1969 short-film documentary "Sean," which was set in a Haight Ashbury flat that housed Sean's large family and a rotating frenzy of "free-spirited" folks. Who knows whether adorable, wise-beyond-his-years Sean was telling the truth about his grass-smoking and -eating (he actually preferred eating it), but his matter-of-fact references to the police, riots, speed freaks, and shoes being "creepy," lead you to believe he probably was. Sean's candor captivated Arlyck and made for an endearing and unusual perspective, which enabled mainstream America to miss the point (as usual) and further stereotype our beloved San Francisco.

Luckily, we all get to see how well Sean turns out in Arlyck's captivating follow-up 30 years later, "Following Sean," which has been airing on PBS's POV this week. It airs one more time Sunday night at 10 p.m. on KQED World and KQED HD. See the trailer here. The original short film "Sean," is avaiable for full viewing on POV's Web site through August 31.

We watched the film the other night and were enamored with the way Arlyck weaved together Sean's family history with his own. It was very interesting to hear Arlyck's perspective on briefly living one floor below Sean's family in 1969 Haight Ashbury, where he wasn't very happy and soon moved back to the East Coast, in comparison to Y2K Haight Ashbury, which he described as "caricatures and commerce." He said it was interesting to see how all of the kids had finally gotten everything they wanted though.

See how Sean turns out after the jump!

"Following Sean" | PBS POV on KQED | Sunday, August 5 at 10 p.m. | Available on DVD, at the library, and on Netflix.

Two "green TV" programs are set to air in the coming weeks, and both focus on making your home more "sustainable."

Tonight at 8 p.m., YourTV20 (yes, it's YOURS) airs an episode of their quarterly program "Your Green Life" called "Eco-Home." Learn how to reduce your carbon footprint, without even leaving your house! Turn of those lights when you aren't in that room. Use recycled toilet paper and paper towels. And switch to those compact fluorescent bulbs, even if the only bulbs we can find emit a nasty greenish light and don't work in any kind of lamp that includes a dimmer or three-way switch. According to this show, better CFLs exist, so maybe we just aren't looking hard enough...

A similar program is PBS's "Building Green" which premieres on June 5th. This series focuses on designing and building environmentally-friendly homes.

Wait a second. Building a home? Well, one can dream...