Street Seen

Fatshion

10

caitlin@sfbg.com

STREET SEEN “Can I do a small rant on boobs?” Fat activist Virgie Tovar’s boobs — I can see most of them in the swank North Beach cocktail bar we’re sitting in — are really big. Many parts of Virgie are, which is kind of her thing. The editor of the recently-published anthology Hot and Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love, and Fashion (Seal Press) talks dirty to telephone sex customers during the day, and carries her curves with a pride that runs completely counter-current to all the ways we are taught to be ashamed of fat in this world.

Obviously, I want to hear her rant about boobs. It turns out to be: Tovar is sick of partners who place their attraction to her squarely on her ample bosom. “I have to have them verbally say that [I’m fat] before we have sex. They can’t accept that they want to have sex with a fat woman.”

So don’t call her busty. Especially since if you do, you’re going to miss the whole point of her look.

“I dress for visibility,” Tovar puts it. You can definitely see her perched somewhat precariously on this North Beach bar stool. Her ample decolletage is emphasized by a floral onesie-now-a-dress, the crotch of which was cut out before our interview for enhanced comfort, a tight skirt, vintage fur coat (“My rule is, I wear fur if it’s 25 years old or older,” she tells me. “I love wearing dead animals”), teal scarf, and knee-high black boots.

You can’t miss Virgie, a fact which our fellow bar patrons quickly learn when we launch into a high-spirited discussion of one of her regular phone sex customers, a “pay pig” who gets off on paying $50 for the pleasure of her telephone voice — $50 every 15 minutes, that is.

She wants you to look at her and see fat, and look at her and see style, and look at her and want to have sex with her — and then she wants you to think about what those things say about your own adherence to normative beauty ideals. Virgie identifies her style as high femme, by her own definition “the intentional performance of femininity in order to subvert masculinity. My fat has become a part of my performance, like jewelery.”

As a chubby child, Tovar shied from glitz and glamour. Girly clothes either didn’t fit, she says, or just plain didn’t fit into her mission to be completely invisible. It was hard to hide, however, from the sartorial impulses of her mother, who loved few things more than embellishing Tovar’s garments with lace and the occasional scene from Disney’s The Little Mermaid, rendered in puff paint.

But Tovar quashed that timidity in adulthood, when she found partners who “found me sexy and wanted to do all these nasty things to me,” she says. “If your liberation comes from somebody eating your ass, by all means necessary.”

She went onto San Francisco State University’s sexuality studies department, where she focused on fat sex, eventually proposing a fat-positive manifesto to Brooke Warner, senior editor at Seal Press. That morphed into Hot and Heavy, a project that Tovar feels coincides with a surge of fat cultural activism, evidence of which she sees popping up, of all places, in retail.

Luscious shopping spots to embrace your own zaftig fabulosity? If you’re down for big brands, Tovar gives high marks to Forever 21’s plus size offerings (“It’s gaudy, it’s slutty. They’ve really tapped into that audience that I’m a part of”), also to ASOS’ Curve line (www.asos.com), Domino Dollhouse (www.dominodollhouse.com), and Cupcake and Cuddlebunny (www.cupcakeandcuddlebunny.com).

Across the country, a smattering of high femme fat vintage stores have popped up: Portland’s Fat Fancy (www.fatfancyfashions.com), Brooklyn’s Re/Dress (whose stock is available online at www.redressnyc.com). And of course, she says, there’s the old standbys: Lane Bryant, Avenue for tights and boots, and the Stonestown Galleria’s most gloriously trashy clothes purveyor, Torrid. Tovar says she finds fat fashion inspiration in Marie Claire writer Nicolette Mason, Marie “Curvy Fashionista” Denee (thecurvyfashionista.mariedenee.com), and the Near-Sighted Owl (www.nearsightedowl.com)

For Tovar, the key to fashion, for girls big, small, and in-between, is ignoring the rules and becoming the fly, fabulous change you want to see. “The tag says no, but the stretch says yes! When I see a garment, I’m seeing hope for all the hopeless situations in the world.”

HOT AND HEAVY READING

with Virgie Tovar, Deah Schwartz, Abby Weintraub, Jessica Judd

Fri/30, 7pm, free

Modern Times Bookstore

2919 24th St., SF

www.moderntimesbookstore.com

www.virgietovar.com

 

Likes the name

0

caitlin@sfbg.com

STREET SEEN “People were like, we wanna wear some clothing from you guys,” San Franpsycho owner Christian Routzen tells me from the behind the counter of his DIY brand’s newish (it’s seven months old) location on newly-trendy Divisadero Street. “But we didn’t make clothing.”

I guess sometimes the brand just comes first, and then the product. Or rather, the movie comes first. Routzen made a 2001 Ocean Beach surf film with cohort Andy Olive called, yes, San Franpsycho. Apparently the flick, along with its 2005 follow-up San Franpsycho: Wet and Wreckless, captured the imagination of certain sector of San Francisco. They wanted T-shirts, so Routzen and Olive located some silkscreening gear and a mail truck and became a presence at Indie Marts, bars, and street fairs, silkscreening clothing with their bon mot. I’ve seen them do it, they get slammed.

“We had people taking off their shirts. Men, women, and children,” concludes Routzen. People resonated with the name, he says.

A couple of bangin’ blonde girls interrupt our conversation to buy wristbands for the surf fashion show the brand is hosting at Public Works that night. Later, I see a shot on Instagram involving a runway, a lot of thigh-high American Apparel tube socks, and bikinis. That same weekend, San Franpsycho was hosting a surf tournament and a poker competition.

The girls recede into the distance, banded. And then a guy interrupts us asking about customizing an aqua sweatshirt, as if to complete the San Franpsycho milieu I’ve found myself in the middle of.

But I kind of want Routzen to spell it out. “Can I ask you a less tangible question? Why’d they want to wear clothes from a bunch of guys that don’t make clothes? It’s all the name, really?”

Routzen shrugs, and hands me a DVD copy of Wet and Wreckless ($20, buy a copy at the store.) I watch it with my roommate the next night. It is a Jackass-paced piece of San Francisco bro-moblia, featuring gentlemen named Simo, Doobie, and Brownie, guys bouncing their penises while frying hot dogs in the kitchen, claymation sex, girls making out, an Ocean Beach parking lot shooting, a broken surfboard montage, and an incoherent interview with Andy Dick. Also: barrel rolls.

Most of the SFP dudes are pretty hot, they surf gnarly OB waves, and they straight-boy don’t give a fuck. Ding ding ding! Well yeah, obvs everybody wants San Franpsycho to rub off on them.

Which is a totally unfair analysis, because Olive and Routzen have (in addition to being attractive) created a real cute, real-real, repurposed wood retail galaxy. The Golden Gate Bridge-San Franpsycho logo can now be found on man-tanks, lady tanks, dog sweatshirts, boy shorts, hoodies, aprons, duffel bags, water bottles. The machines they’re printed on are clearly visible in the shop’s workspace.

The boys also sell a host of products made by buddies who live in the immediate neighborhood. The ginger-Afroed Olive holds up an expanse of black Cordura nylon, excitedly gesturing at a bank on the wall of the classic roll-top, leather-strapped Motley Goods backpacks (also available on Etsy) that it will be made into. That brand’s based out of their friend’s apartment, Olive says. “Literally, two blocks away.” The shop also stocks Sea Pony Couture (sea-pony-couture.myshopify.com), a line of delicate gold-chained, be-charmed jewelry by San Franciscan Fatima Fleming.

505 Divisadero, SF. (415) 829-7874, www.sanfranpsycho.com

Far, far away from the San Franpsycho clubhouse sits a Noe Valley clothing store that has absolutely zero hot men in it, but managed to pull me in on the strength of its color palette alone (I am, at my heart, a primary shades kind of person. This is Atlantis and I’m like, nautical.)

Said shop was Mill, and it’s MILF territory — at least, such were the women audibly rhapsodizing over the shop’s stock while I was there, and who were subsequently drawn in by the incredibly informative employees for a conversation about respective kids’ ages, the pleasures of teaching one’s youngster how to give mommy a foot massage, etc.

I was back in the dressing room trying on my Japanese striped/solid BlueBlue boatneck dress, silk drawstring pants with daisy motif by Janezic (a line designed by Michele Janezic, Mill’s store manager whose drapey tank tops are a touch more club-ready and sexy than the rest of Mill’s offerings), and high-waisted, below-the-knee, A-line Levi’s denim skirt.

“I just can’t believe this! It’s amazing,” went the raptures. I should mention that Mill is the brand-new female wear offshoot of beloved Castro store Unionmade. Unionmade was recently dinged by Gawker because its clothes are not, sadly, union-made. Nonetheless, its collection has garnered an enthusiastic following among those who swoon for spendy, high quality denim and other rugged forms of fashion. These followers included females, leading to the birth of Mill, which carries some unisex items in addition to female items from the same brands as Unionmade.

“The philosophy of Mill is to offer classic, quality, and timeless products,” Janezic told me in an email after my visit (I didn’t cop any of the items I tried on, but that was more a question of insufficient funds than personal proclivity because I wanted them all very badly. Even the Barbour “Morris” waxed utility jacket that seemed like a must-have for the drippy SF winter was $379, so I guess I must not-have it sob.)

But I’ll tell you this: if Mill ever needs someone to watch the store at night, say curl up on a pile of goldenrod Levi’s wool trenches lined with poncho material next to its stacks of design mags, wake up in the morning and go out brand representing in some Imogene + Willie jeans (this is cute — manufactured in Tennessee by a twangy couple who started in a gas station basement and still get their fabric from one the country’s last and oldest denim factories) and Gitman Bros. gingham button-ups…

… well, at least now they know my name.

3751 24th St., SF. (415) 401-8920, www.millmercantile.com

Weezy, take notes

0

caitlin@sfbg.com

STREET SEEN Bianca Starr has not only owned a club (222 Club), boutique (eponymous), and soon-to-be clothing brand (same) in these foggy blocks — she also grew up in San Francisco and now raises and, presumably, dresses two brilliant little boys here. So after our photoshoot in advance of her locally made Wed/7 Style From Within fashion show, I ask her what Bay Area style means to her. She doesn’t have a lot to say about color palette, designer influences, or silhouettes.

“We have become accustomed to layering and always preparing for weather changes,” she tells me. Practical, yes, but thanks to that fog monster, unpredictable meteorological happenings give us opportunity for mad flair. “With this we are able to really get away with a lot,” concludes Starr.

The layered look was represented by a few of the outfits Starr and Collage Clothing Lounge (3344 Lakeshore, Oakl. (510) 452-3344) owner Amanda Rae were pulling off the racks during our interview. Chunky sweaters, flowy tanks, maxi skirts, sheer blouses, and bangles on bangles on bangles poured out of Rae’s little shop, which the bashful businesswoman gamely donned for some quick photos behind the store.

This week, the city is somewhat deluged in fashion events (keep reading!), but this Starr’s second runway-club night is the one to check out for versatile local fashion. Three boutiques — Collage, Mission Statement, and Artillery Art Gallery — will be dressing the models. She’s invited her favorite “runway DJ” Ry Toast and Bayonics dreamboat Rojai to drop some tracks from his upcoming debut album.

In the future, Starr says the shows will be a great launching pad for that new clothes line. Expect it to drop by the time the next Style From Within rolls around. She also wanted to use this space to let Lil Wayne know her styling services are available next time he’s in town, and who am I to say I’ve got better things to write about?

Style From Within Vol. 2 Wed/7 9pm-2am, free before 10:30pm with RSVP to bianca@biancastarr.com; $5 at door. Harlot, 46 Minna, SF. www.biancastarr.com

 

THE BOLD ITALIC’S HABERDASH

Damn the men look good in this town. I thank the Bold Italic’s recent spread of fashionable FiDi fellows for proof that downtown does have soul, and I heartily recommend attending the website’s local malewear runway show. Looks from Lower Haight skate chic boutique D Structure, denim gods Self Edge, bespoke shirtsmiths The Artful Gentleman, and more — all soundtracked with a live set by LA’s sexy-breathless pop beatmakers Wildcat! Wildcat!

Wed/7 8-11pm, $30. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.thebolditalic.com

 

VIRGIE TOVAR

Only no one on this page has style like Virgie Tovar, fat activist. Tovar recently pulled together an inspirational collection of fat chick stories, musings, and manifestos in Hot and Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love, and Fashion. To read is to luxuriate in the notion that our bodies are beauty, regardless and because of their deviation from fashion mag norms. Tovar’s reading today with fellow Hot and Heavy will be a celebration of fatshion, self-acceptance, and sparkles.

Thu/8 7:30pm, free. The Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF. (415) 863-8688, www.booksmith.com

 

RETROFIT REPUBLIC PRESENTS ADAPTATION

Attend this weekend’s Green Festival for its explosion of new, sustainable products and foodstuffs, lectures, and musical performances by enviro-leaning luminaries. But after Dolores Huerta’s main stage keynote address on Saturday, make sure you turn your fashionista side-eye at a Retrofit Republic-curated lineup of upcycled ‘fits by textile queen Jeanette Au, stylist duo the Bellwether Project, Mission vintage shop 31 Rax, and more.

Sat/10 6-7pm, free with $10 Green Festival day pass. Concourse Exhibition Center, 635 Eighth St., SF. www.greenfestivals.org

 

FASHION INCUBATOR SAN FRANCISCO WANTS YOU

… If you’ve got skills, I mean. Each year, the nonprofit picks six budding fashion designers upon which to lavish studio space in the Macy’s offices downtown. And you don’t just get access to a rad straight stitch machine: the program includes a year’s worth of classes on all the skills you need to become a ravishing entrepreneur.

Applications due Nov. 30. www.fashionincubatorsf.org

Cosmetic changes

0

caitlin@sfbg.com

STREET SEEN “Oh, now there’s someone taking a picture of us,” says Swagger Cosmetics founder Blake Karamazov, gesturing at a paparazzi who is snapping away through the cafe’s plate glass window. No shade, shutterbug — drag visions being interviewed while eating vegan Asian pear pie at 2:30pm deserve a capture or 10. (But c’mon, next time ask first.)

Glossy crimson lips, exaggerated lined cat eyes, black bow, LBD, wig. Today, Karamazov’s is a nice, daytime teal, her signature color. You can buy it in sparkly eyeshadow form on her line’s website. The hue’s called Swagger, natch.

Karamazov’s experiments in makeup began as a way to facilitate her own total disregard for normative wardrobe choices. Not surprisingly, given her own penchant of out-of-this-world looks, her line celebrates others with non-fuckwithable attitude.

A Swagger shoot this summer starred Sailorhank, a nine-year old boy from Seattle who crosses gender lines like a champ and, providentially, was a cinch for the diminutive Karamazov to style — they share a shoe size. She tells me that her colors are made for “any club kid, anyone interested in genderbending, androgyny.”

We get back to her line of drag-ready shadows and glosses, which are spread out on the counter in front of us in the brand’s bow-and-diamond-bedecked containers. The woman outside the window keeps snapping.

Karamazov’s makeup is made by her own darling little hands right here in (well, South) San Francisco. Every little box of glitter and glow is completely animal product-free. Vegan. Like the pie. Karamazov steers clear of animal products in her diet and elsewhere.

“The main problem [with conventional makeup lines] is the animal testing,” she tells me. Little-known, undeniably icky substances like carmine (extracted from beetles) and lanolin (charmingly, from the grease in sheep’s wool) are present in trace amounts in makeup products.

But it is the mainly the practice of testing substance on defenseless furry friends — incredibly difficult to suss out, given flaccid labeling requirements — that led Karamazov to the first bulk purchase of the ingredients she needed for her club looks.

Besides, she tells me, “when I was in college there was no brands that had weird colors. If you wanted green lipstick, you had to get clown makeup.” She’s not knocking theatrical brands, but since she wears vivid shades on her face all the time, Karamazov needed something that smelled better, lasted longer, was less greasy than costume products. Glamour is a lifestyle, after all.

After mastering her own mixes, she’d make special blends for birthday presents, whip up a peachy blush for a friend who couldn’t find just the right hue in stores. One thing led to another, and now she’s a business owner, selling colors named after Amanda Lepore and Kanye West songs (“one day all these people will sue me and I’ll know I’ve made it,”) through her site to places as far away as Portugal, Canada, even.

So quickly now, before the camera points in another direction: what kind of looks is Karamazov favoring for these shorter days and longer nights? Darker, vampy hues, she tells me, especially when worn all around the eye. She’s feeling smoky and metallic shades, and only the occasional pop of color. “Mostly really neutral” for fall. And a hint of dewiness, easily attained with a pot of her Champagne in the Bubble Bath highlighter. But only to supplement to your pre-existing glow.

Girl on wall

5

caitlin@sfbg.com

STREET SEEN Welcome welcome, friends, to my new column. You’ll wanna check back here for Bay Area style — clothes, weed, art, sex, y’know. But this week, international women’s studies: a Puerto Rican street artist on domestic violence, in her home town.

It may have been the moment of my recent trip to check out San Juan’s first street art festival.

Artist Sofia Maldonado was teaching no less than four high school females how to properly shade the middle fingers extending from two painted yellow fists. Lunchtime traffic whizzes past Maldonado’s mural in San Juan’s Santurce neighborhood, site of the 12-plus walls that would be painted as part of the week-long Los Muros Hablan. Small, wandering packs of street art fans stopped by intermittently, snapping photos, talking among themselves.

The 28-year old Maldonado’s mural is pretty dreamy for anyone overdosed on commercial, overly-testosteroned street art. It addresses domestic violence in Puerto Rico, showing a bashed-but-not-beaten beauty and those fists, which — once properly shaded — were lettered with “basta ya/enough already.” The work’s not soft, despite the bright colors she used to paint it.

Days earlier, when the moderator at a panel discussion at San Juan’s contemporary art museum that was part of the Los Muros Hablan programming asked the all-male panel of artists (Maldonado was south, painting a commission in the town of Ponce) to weigh in on female muralists, one responded that he was in favor. “They’re sexy,” he said, to a hearty laugh from the audience.

The domestic violence mural wasn’t the greatest piece of artwork that was created in San Juan that week. But then, Maldonado had a different intention than many of her male peers at Los Muros Hablan.

“Nowadays, I feel like doing murals is how to give back to the community.” It’s the afternoon and Maldonado and I are eating at a cafe a few blocks from her wall. “Especially for girls in Puerto Rico, it’s important to have a strong female representation.”

Maldonado grew up in San Juan, going to the same art school down the street that her eager assistants attend. She started painting walls with brushes when, inspired by the vivid street art on walls in France and Spain, she tired of the dull color palette available in aerosol on the island. She rolled with the boys, mainly. A few of them, from her San Juan crew, are painting alongside her at Los Muros Hablan.

After high school, she moved to New York City, got her MFA, found artistic success inside the studio too. She’s on the board of Cre8tive YouTH*nk, an organization that facilitates art projects that encourage critical thinking in at-risk youth. The week after Puerto Rico, she was at the Bronx Museum, doing a mural with the help of New York kids.

She’s the only female who had a wall at the festival. She’s also the only artist whose work is currently taking up an entire floor at the contemporary art museum. “She’s one of the best-known women these days, not only in urban art, but in visual art in Puerto Rico,” said Elizabeth Barreto, another San Juan street artist who painted in Los Muros Hablan’s all-female live painting and DJ event.

Along the museum’s open-air hallways, Maldonado’s controversial renderings of bra-less, heavily accessorized women of color are displayed. Google search “Sofia Maldonado 42nd Street mural” for the blowback she incurred when she erected them in Times Square. Maldonado tells me that the hurt the figures dredged up among people of color says more than the piece itself.

Her new canvas work also bears the language of graffiti, the strokes, the characters. But as a medium — her work’s not really about “getting up” anymore. She hasn’t rejected the bold artistic mark that you have to have if you paint in the streets, but you get a sense that Maldonado knows that audacity’s a tool, a microphone you use, not an end in itself.

She won’t really stand for all my editorializing. Actually, she kind of wanted me to shut up about her being a female role model. Her feminism is hard to describe in a 745-word article.

“You have to know it’s a male’s world, like any other profession,” she tells me, shrugging off all my questions about her take on the street art gender divide. “You gotta be strong.”

But one can’t help but read into her focus when it comes to education. “I don’t feel like I’m representing,” she concludes. “But I do feel like I need to set an example.”

 

Frog killers in the heat: San Juan’s first street art festival

1

Sego painted a coqui. That makes sense because the soft-spoken Mexican mural artist dabbles luminously in the animal kingdom, improbably creating detailed scenes of magical realism with little more than aerosol cans.

The coqui is Puerto Rico’s mascot, the tranquil frog that defines the nighttime soundscape, and plagues tourists unused to the noise with its chirps. Sego’s wall, part of the first street art festival in San Juan history Los Muros Hablan, was an “aww” moment for the passing cars (and there are a lot of them. Sweltering San Juan lives and dies by the air-conditioned automobile.)

Less than a mile away, Roa is working on an iguana that, despite its vampy, lounging posture, holds a dead coqui in one languid claw. Roa is Belgium, and generally acknowledged to have popularized animal drawings in this brave new world of gallery-approved street artists. Delayed by the theft of his lift’s batteries and a few dehabilitating hangovers, he’s probably still working on the piece in San Juan’s 90 degree humid swampiness.

He left the frog death and pertaining iguana paw for the end of the piece. While I lounged in the shade of an orange road safety buoy last week, I watched cars stop, belching young men whose only desire was to take a picture with Roa. All the better if he was holding his baseball cap over his face (he always is.) Later these images would pop up on Instagram, appropriately hashtagged so that we could review them easily.

I wonder how San Juan will like the crushed coqui. “You can see a lot of things in it,” Roa told me on a late-night ride out to said jungle with some other Los Muros artists and attaches. The long-ago Spanish rule of Puerto Rico, the right-now United States colonization of the island. “There’s a lot of ways to interpret it,” he told me. 

Though one will note a preponderance of animal renderings in the Los Muros Hablan renderings, it wasn’t all frogs and frog-killers in the Santurce streets. Local legend Sofia Maldonado threw up a warning about the 709 women who have been murdered in Puerto Rico between 2000 and 2011. Though Maldonado was the only female muralist at the fest, La Repuesta — the spectacular, grungy club that gave over a back room to serve as Los Muros’ nerve center and gathering spot for the Escuela Central de Artes Visuales (Center High for the Visual Arts) students that assisted, and generally mooned around the artists in the festival — did host a Los Muros ladies night, featuring an all-female cast of live painters and DJs. Women made up the bulk of the audience at an artist panel discussion at San Juan’s Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Museum of Contemporary Art), looked up at the scenes being sprayed on their city’s walls.

Argentina’s Jaz labored over a mural so layered it came off looking like an illustration from an Illuminati-made children’s book.

Mexico’s Nuezz painted a folkloric, horizontal man in a hat along the side of La Respuesta.

Ever from Buenos Aires is working (again, altitude delays) on a six-story naked woman shooting colorful shapes from her eyes who may or may not bear a resemblance to your humble writer, whose labia may or may have been seen by a substancial segment of San Juan commuters.

Spain’s Aryz (you’ll remember him from that Aesop Rock album cover) gave birth to a mermaid-toned skeleton man on a condo building. 

Juan Fernandez, one half of the La Pandilla duo that along with mosaic artist Celso helped to organize the entire affair, drew endless loops that eventually formed a song bird. Alexis Diaz, the other half, had barely gotten started by the time I left Puerto Rico, so busy was he shuttling fellow artists from hotel to breakfast to wall and replacing stolen lift batteries. I’m sure whatever he’s working on will turn out great though. 

Painting big murals is not, for most of even its stars, a money-making proposition. Los Muros Hablan paid its visiting artists airfare to the island, kitted them out with supplies, and occasionally-late lifts to access the dizzying heights of their canvases in exchange for their services in bringing attention to the often-overlooked Santurce neighborhood.

Santurce’s blocks, though they stand a 10-minute bike ride from the city’s white sand Ocean Park, are largely vacant by night. Flashy new condo developments dot the area, betting that new inhabitants will warm to a walkable ‘hood. One wonders how they feel about dead coquis

In the case of its international visitors, the fest took charge of feeding the beasts, a source of consternation among the local painters. Making murals like these is generally just a way to make one’s impression on the streets, and of course the many bajillions of street art fans addicted to RSS feeds around the world.

Generally at these festivals, the artists wear their painted-ass shorts and sneakers 24 hours a day, and sleep three to a room until they’re off on the next flight — to Australia, to New York, back to Barcelona. They get paid in new tans and Instagram followers, aim for the interest of art collectors. Such is street life, even if you’re in charge of scenery. 

Check next week’s paper for the debut of my new column Street Seen, featuring my interview of all-around Puerto Rican badass — and only female muralist at Los Muros Hablan — Sofia Maldonado

Medical marijuana is over

4

caitlin@sfbg.com

HERBWISE Hey potheads, welcome to what figures to be the last Herbwise column for the time being.

But we’ve had some good sessions together, no? Over the course of a very eventful year in marijuana, we spoke with Roseanne Barr, Black Panthers, oncologists, tax attorneys, Coral Reefer. Snoop Dogg, Fiona Apple, Pat Robertson, the president of Uruguay, and an actress from the Blair Witch Project all made our news call. They all do the weed, or support such things, and that list alone should serve as proof that cannabis has irrevocably entered the mainstream.

We went around the world to see how pot was faring in other corners. Seattle’s medical marijuana champion-DIY pop star Lisa Dank reported back from South By Southwest. I chatted with the author of medical marijuana legislation in Washington, DC, dropped in on a Berlin head shop employee, and took a walk with a small town politician up in the Marin County hills of Fairfax.

Honestly, I didn’t want to write about politics at all when we started the column. Boring! Fake! Politricks! Etcetera. But then last September, the IRS intensified its hounding of several major Bay Area dispensaries, cheating them out of perfectly reasonable tax exemptions. Then, at an October 7 press conference in Sacramento, US Attorneys let us know they were going to start being a bummer.

A year later, we’re short a whole bunch of places to get marijuana, including no less than two of the clubs I personally depended on. Hiss. Against my best intentions, current events necessitated that Herbwise focus on law and order, from time to time.

But there’s been good moments (the week I wrote Herbwise high as hell in my cubicle on Amoré, the cannabis aphrodisiac shot), just like the especially-bad moments (the week I bore the tidings that major credit card companies would no longer process sale of marijuana and that beloved local dispensary Vapor Room was closing due to threatening letters from federal agencies. That week I wrote about Lady Gaga.) I’m privileged to have been able to weigh in on a year that will surely change the future of cannabis, for better or worse.

Some words on words: I got told 800 times to not call it “pot” or “weed.” One person wrote to say “flower” was better terminology. Please don’t mix us up with the recreational users, some card carrying marijuana users told me. You’re hurting our quest to be taken seriously.

But I need my synonyms. Nah, more importantly, I think this not-mixing is the problem. Focusing the movement for increased access to cannabis on the medical marijuana industry isn’t working. Drop the pretense, I say. The notion that weed can only be prescribed by a medical professional is not just dumb, it’s also not gonna get us anywhere. The longer we stigmatize recreational users, the longer people (and by people I mean young men of color, because that’s who our racist prison system is filled with) are going to be sent to jail for a stupid reason. And less people will feel connected enough to the movement to create the kind of buzz that will eventually change public opinion. And prisonmakers and anti-drug warriors will continue to get the money that should be going to our schools and to our public library flag burning sessions where everyone is handed a pink thong to wear at the outset and ordered to chant baby-killing nursery rhymes in Spanish. Broadcast on PBS.

Obviously, I’m not saying that cannabis doesn’t have medical usages. Studies have recently emerged that suggest it stops the spread of cancer in the body, and any patient that has AIDS or another wasting, awful, strength-sapping disease can tell you that cannabis can be a literal life saver when it comes to stimulating appetite and general pain management.

But the ways in which people use cannabis are multitudinous, and the only reason it’s regulated differently than tobacco, wine, liquor, McDonald’s, and the thousand other things you can abuse out of moderation is because of government and corporate control. You smoke to relax after a hard day, you smoke to bond with friends, you smoke to have fun.

Herbwise bids you adieu. We’ll still be covering cannabis in the Guardian, of course, and like a phoenix, I’ll be rising from this spent bowl with Street Seen, a new column focusing on all the rad things happening in street art, and fashion, and other founts of alternative Bay Area culture.

Thanks for being there. Stay high.