If you have even a passing interest in the arts scene in the SF Bay Area, do yourself a favor and check out Chloe Veltman’s excellent blog, lies like truth.

It’s one of the most refreshingly paced blogs I’ve come across. Veltman posts a few times a week and the posts are short, but very concise. She’s a good enough writer that she can cover a lot of ground in a small amount of space, so even after just a few paragraphs, you feel like you got a lot of solid information.

The range of topics is wide: theatre, the visual arts, and many genres of music all fall within her radar. Her criticism is intelligent and well-balanced, and she highlights artists and work often missed by the larger media outlets but still worthy of attention.

The quality of her work has attracted an equally intelligent audience: the signal-to-noise ratio of the user comments is as high as you’ll find anywhere.

Perhaps that thing I like the most is that her posts remind me of how vibrant and diverse the arts scene in the Bay Area is. I no longer take for granted how lucky we are to live here. It helps, even in a small way, to make the cost of living here a little easier to bear.