The Campaign for America’s Future has launched a project called the Big Con, which argues that conservatism — not just the Bush administration’s corruption and incompetence — is causing this country’s most serious problems.
Volume 41 [2006–07]
Wild Tigers, Painted Bird
COSTUME One gray Garfield sweatshirt; a blue wool sleeveless sweater with little birds and a white sheep stitched on it; clean Chuck Taylor high-tops; an orange Kawasaki motorcycle T-shirt; a little red hoodie; a beige suede vest with tassels. These are some of the clothes sported by Logan (Malcolm Stumpf), the gender-jumping cusp-of-teens boy at the center of Cam Archer’s debut feature, Wild Tigers I Have Known.
"At that age you aren’t concerned with what other people think. You choose what [clothing] appeals to you – you’re just going for it," says Stephanie Volkmar, the film’s costume designer, as cars whiz by on Guerrero Street. "Logan’s outfits are sometimes outrageous, or some might say a little risque. Cam has an obsession with short-shorts and tank tops. He’ll be mad if that makes it into print, but it does help express the character’s vulnerability. We wanted Logan to wear things that would make him seem awkward and different."
One reason I’m asking Volkmar about her no-budget costume work for Wild Tigers is that she works at the store we’re sitting next to, Painted Bird. Over the past two years, I’ve assembled a Painted Bird wardrobe about as expansive as Logan’s, though riddled with the occasional label (Dior, Gucci, Adidas – all cheap), thus proving Volkmar’s point that in comparison to adults, kids just don’t care.
It turns out that Painted Bird’s connection to Archer’s movie – which, after debuting last year at the Sundance Film Festival, plays as part of the Mission Creek festivities – is also familial. The director’s brother, Nate, who did the movie’s layered, impressionistic sound design, is (along with Sonny Walker) one of the shop’s co-owners. "Nate is good at finding [music] that blows me away," Volkmar says. He certainly succeeds in Wild Tigers, braiding everything from the hand claps and "oo-oowoh" ‘s of the Michael Zager Band’s disco classic "Let’s All Chant" to the drowsy, faraway loneliness of Laura Nyro’s "Desiree" and the Langley Schools Music Project around Logan’s daydreams.
According to Volkmar, both Wild Tigers and Painted Bird emerged from family or familylike bonds formed in Santa Clara, where she met Cam Archer and worked on about 10 other short projects with him. Judging by the many five-star reviews for Painted Bird on sites such as Yelp, I’m not the only one who wants to rave about Walker and Nate Archer’s shop while also being protective of it. Why? It avoids the kitsch pitfalls and the overdressed look favored by SF vintage and secondhand places, and most important, its low prices correspond with a friendly atmosphere. Keeping an eye out for quality moderate vintage labels as much as typical high-end names, the Painted Bird folks are in the clothing biz because they like clothes, and they have a definite, yet easygoing, sensibility.
In Wild Tigers, Logan has a unique sensibility too, but his run through lust is a mostly solitary one. Though its conflation of the titular animals with desire might be a nod to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (as well as drawn from Santa Clara’s untamed suburban terrain), Archer’s movie emerges from the still too-small genre of US queer kids’ films that includes Todd Haynes’s Dottie Gets Spanked, Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation, Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin, and SF director Justin Kelly’s new Cannes-bound short, Front. (Also, one of Wild Tigers‘ executive producers, Darren Stein, was behind the pre-Tarnation queer childhood doc Keep the Camera on Me.) Without a doubt, Volkmar’s costumes have a role in some of the movie’s best scenes, such as when Logan’s friend Joey (Max Paradise) – complete with a golden bowl cut and a striped shirt buttoned all the way up to its collar – tries to get him to contribute to a "ways to be cool" list.
A cynic might point out that there isn’t a huge gap between the outfits sported by the children of Wild Tigers and the clothes favored by San Francisco’s eternal youth of today. (I stand semiconvicted.) In fact, Volkmar drew extensively from the shop where she works while dressing the movie’s primarily preteen and teen characters. But the spirit of Painted Bird’s staff is a lot like Logan from Wild Tigers: not too cool for school, just – as Volkmar says – going for it. (Johnny Ray Huston)
WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN
Wed/16, call or see Web site for time, $4-$8
Roxie Film Center
3117 and 3125 16th St., SF
(415) 863-1087
www.roxie.com
www.paintedbird.org
Eyes on the prize
The recent news that a food writer from Los Angeles won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism puts us on notice that food writing at its best is an art form – also that LA is a serious food town, loath though we may be to admit it. The southland has access to all sorts of local agricultural bounty, a nearby wine country (in Santa Barbara County), and a polyglot population that represents much of the world. It also has something we don’t have – an international border just miles away, with a genuinely different culture on the other side. This must be massively stimuutf8g.
Criticism is a minor art, secondary and derivative – there must be some larger, primary subject at hand to examine and consider – but its subordinate position doesn’t make it less worthy. Authentic food criticism tends to overcome this limitation anyway, since, handled in a certain way, it becomes a species of social or cultural criticism, a meditation on how people live their lives. As anyone who’s traveled abroad will know, one’s first and indelible experiences of other cultures often have to do with food: what it is, how it is grown or gathered, how it is prepared and presented. If it is true that one feels most American when outside of America, then perhaps it is also true that our industrial-food folly becomes most apparent to us when we are sitting in some cafe in a faraway land, awash in local food habits and practices that are hundreds or thousands of years old, and no one has heard of Velveeta.
The difference between criticism and reviewing is a segment of the border between art and craft, with the former more keenly attentive to wider and deeper meanings. Many of our food-involved locals abide by a credo of living to eat, but because this is true to some extent of every animal on the planet, its meaning seems a little watery to me and appears to involve mainly the hunt for the "best" version of this or that. I have no particular complaint with this, just as I have no quarrel with gearheads or fanciers of pedigreed dogs. But, as with other forms of monomania, it does have a flattening effect, reducing the world to a single dimension. LA is flat, but it isn’t just flat.
Paul Reidinger
> paulr@sfbg.com
Stalk tips
> cheryl@sfbg.com
Nothing is what it seems in Red Road, a wonderfully restrained thriller that marks the feature debut of British writer-director Andrea Arnold. Jackie (a fierce Kate Dickie) works as a surveillance camera operator, studying closed-circuit feeds streaming from Glasgow’s streets. Her life is mysterious without being spectacular; for one thing, she lives alone but wears a wedding ring. Clearly, she’s had a tragic past, and her present is haunted by the specter of unfinished business – but what, exactly? And who is the mysterious man (Tony Curran) she pursues after spotting him on one of her monitors?
"The feedback I’m getting is that a lot of people don’t work it out exactly until the end," Arnold told me over the phone from Canada, where we missed meeting at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival. "I do sometimes think, ‘Oh god, was I too subtle?’ "
Being too subtle is a problem more directors should have. Arnold’s gift for capturing complicated characters and gritty urban settings was first displayed in Wasp, her 2003 Oscar-winning short film. In it impoverished young mother Zoe (Red Road costar Nathalie Press) parks her unsettlingly large brood in the parking lot of a pub after she determines it’s high time for a child-free date night. Near-tragedy ensues, but through it all Zoe remains sympathetic, not pathetic, despite the questionable decisions she makes along the way. This quality is shared by Red Road‘s Jackie.
"I knew I was taking things far by her behaving in a way that you didn’t completely understand. That was a risk of people running out of patience [with her]," Arnold said of Jackie, whose aloof demeanor makes her actions, including hooking up with a man she apparently hates, all the more surprising. "I think it takes a while to get to know her. But I like characters that are not so easy or straightforward."
Arnold’s interest in complex characters brings depth to her stories, which on the surface seem to simply follow the daily lives of rather ordinary people. "I think all human beings are very complicated in their circumstances and their environments – sometimes people don’t always behave in the best way. It doesn’t mean to say that they’re bad," she said. "I like seeing people that may not be easily likable to start. But then when you get to understand them more, when you see them in a more three-dimensional way, then you at least understand them, or you have empathy for them rather than immediately making a judgment about them."
Though she fielded suggestions to turn Wasp into her first feature, she was set on Red Road – even after she won the Oscar. It’s the first product of Advance Party, a concept project in which three directors will make films featuring the same group of characters, but each with distinct stories.
"Zentropa [cofounded by Danish director Lars von Trier] and [Scotland’s] Sigma Films had the idea of making films with rules, a bit like the Dogme films. Zentropa were very much involved in the Dogme thing. They were looking for filmmakers who hadn’t made a feature film before, and they saw Wasp when it premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival," Arnold recalled. "They rang me up, and it went from there."
Danish filmmakers Anders Thomas Jensen and Lone Scherfig sketched out the characters, who are required to appear in all the films and be played by the same actors. Arnold and the other two Advance Party participants – Dane Mikkel Norgaard and Scot Morag McKinnon – cast together and discussed story lines that each would pursue, but the films are stand-alone narratives in which "the other directors are free to create their entire universe."
Red Road‘s universe is bleak enough even before Jackie explores its seedier pockets, first through TV screens and then by physically visiting the places she’s seen on video. The surveillance theme is a nod to classic cinema (think Rear Window, The Conversation) and the information age.
"I’ve read we’ve got 20 percent of the world’s cameras in the UK," Arnold said. "There’s a lot of CCTV – it’s kind of a fact of life in this day and age. But my character uses it in a way that people are not supposed to use it. It’s supposed to be a crime-prevention tool; you’re not supposed to be following people. But who wouldn’t be tempted? I find just watching people fascinating, people going about their lives and doing ordinary things. I find it riveting." *
RED ROAD
Opens Fri/4
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com
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www.myspace.com/redroadfilm
Cerebral vortex
> a&eletters@sfbg.com
Guy Maddin, that demented dealer in antiquities responsible for such cinematic curiosities as The Saddest Music in the World and the much-loved short The Heart of the World, has a new film showing at the Castro Theatre as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. The semiautobiographical Brand upon the Brain! – a silent quasi-horror film about an orphanage that harvests life-giving brain juice from its wards – will be accompanied by a live orchestra, Foley artists, a castrato, and narration by local star Joan Chen. Maddin, winner of the Persistence of Vision Award at last year’s festival, spoke with the Guardian about his new film and a whole lot of other stuff.
SFBG How involved were you in orchestrating the live performance of Brand upon the Brain!?
GUY MADDIN Well, I was pretty involved in insisting on it. I really, really, really wanted it. In its first incarnation at the Toronto Film Festival, the directors of the festival were good about it. They were gracious, and they made it possible, and then it sort of set the standard for subsequent shows…. I never worried before. You know, when you’re a filmmaker, there’s something in the word film that almost seems to imply the creator is making it more for him or herself. But when you’re putting on a live event, you just automatically …
SFBG You think more about the audience?
GM Yeah, I’ve become more of a showman…. I sort of staged it as an event as a form of boredom insurance, because I do know that you only buy so much audience goodwill with live performances. But then that wasn’t enough for me – I had to add Foley and an interlocutor, and I’m lucky enough to know a bona fide castrato.
SFBG Wait, this is a bona fide castrato?
GM He is, but, well, you know, he wasn’t castrated by the pope [laughs] or anything like that…. He’s an old friend of mine, and I met him many years ago in a steam bath in Winnipeg. I just heard from out of the thick steam a very unearthly voice and for a few nanoseconds thought I was in the wrong steam bath. He sings in a boys’ choir still to this day even though he’s 45 years old. I think his voice just never changed.
SFBG What are you working on right now?
GM I’m pleased to tell you I’m finishing up a documentary on my hometown of Winnipeg. And I’m collaborating with a poet, John Ashbery, on a feature-length Internet interactive movie labyrinth, so that’s kind of exciting for me. And I’m also collaborating on a script in its early stages with Kazuo Ishiguro.
SFBG I heard on some commentary track that you put together features in 20 days or something nuts like that.
GM Yeah, I really like to work quickly. But though most people would never suspect this of me, I really care about scripts being in good shape. And I’m especially proud of the script for Brand upon the Brain!. I feel it’s accessible without at all compromising anything I’ve ever wanted to do. One thing I’ve learned how to do is to become more honest about myself, about how horrible a person I’ve been over the years, and somehow the more honest I am, the more literarily solid my scripts feel.
SFBG Yeah, that’s the dirty secret of film and literature: the nastier you are about yourself –
GM Yeah, the more self-loathing you are, the more self-loving you come off. In this case the protagonist in the movie is actually named Guy Maddin, so it enabled me to be supermasochistic. I just don’t have the imagination to think up the kind of things that are in this movie. There are things that I’ve just outed my family on.
SFBG Really?
GM It’s all there. I just don’t have the time or the genius to –
SFBG To think of nasty things that aren’t true?
GM Yeah, I just had to transplant them pell-mell and wholesale into the body of this thing, and then it was just a simple matter of putting them in order. *
BRAND UPON THE BRAIN
Mon/7, 8 p.m., $20
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
For a longer version of this interview and for short reviews of other films from the second week of the San Francisco International Film Festival, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.
The Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival 2007
MCMAF founder Jeff Ray surveys the dream and the damage
A jolly good Vincent Gallo taps into his musical wellspring
After years of homelessness and substance addiction, the Chamber Strings’ Kevin Junior returns
The Dilettantes take love to the streets
YACHT’s Jona Bechtolt believes in you, dancing
With Buy Hidden Persuaders, I Am Spoonbender continue to remove our veils
Gary Higgins: Redheaded stranger
Gowns connect this world and the next
All that glitters just may be Sugar and Gold
Finding refuge in the Harbours
Our selected picks at the Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival
Full of Zizek
Despite Sigmund Freud’s strong distrust of cinema ("I do not consider it possible to represent our abstractions graphically in any respectable manner," he firmly wrote in a letter to an inquiring film producer), Freudian psychoanalytic theory – primarily as reread by the French analyst Jacques Lacan – has come to form the bedrock of much academic film criticism and theory since the 1960s. Anyone who has had a brush with a film class in college has probably gotten an earful of 50-cent concepts such as scopohilia, suture, fantasy, and everyone’s favorite chew toy of power, the phallus.
If you didn’t take notes the first time around, you might want to while watching Sophie Fiennes’s The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, a veritable crash course on what film can tell us about psychoanalysis and what psychoanalysis can (and sometimes can’t) tell us about film. Fiennes may be listed as the director and producer, but this monster of a clip reel is really the baby of its host and our tour guide, the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek.
Ursine in stature and always slightly disheveled, Zizek is no stranger to the camera. In Astra Taylor’s somewhat worshipful documentary, Zizek! (2005), he delivered his mile-a-minute thought trains, encompassing everything from ethnic jokes to Hegel, with a brusqueness befitting a football coach and the on-the-fly reflexes of a standup comic. Zizek is in similar form in Pervert’s Guide, which isn’t so much a guide as a meandering recapitulation of some of his major talking points, first laid down in books such as Looking Awry and Enjoy Your Sinthome!
Zizek’s central thesis is that film is our most perverted art form, since it doesn’t really tell us what to desire but rather how to desire. Using an array of snippets – from The Exorcist to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Charlie Chaplin films to vintage Disney cartoons – Zizek illustrates how cinema is the ultimate fantasy machine (which sometimes produces films about fantasy machines. See: Tarkovsky). We project our desires onto the events and characters we watch, Zizek explains, inasmuch as those desires are already psychically inscribed long before they are played out onscreen. Film often literalizes these psychic structures or, at the very least, sets them into relief.
As in his books, here Zizek will often take a basic question or proposition (such as "Why is the only good woman a dead woman?" – when discussing Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo), and turn it inside out, revealing the hidden issue that was actually being addressed or occluded all along ("Because men contain the threat of desire by mortifying their objects of desire: women").
Hitchcock and Lacan make many appearances, being that they are two of Zizek’s favorite bedfellows – the man wrote a book about both. (Zizek has a go at David Lynch now and then, but his readings of Lynch’s "primal scenes" and "terrorizing, clownish father figures" are a little pat.) It is not surprising, then, that some of his most brilliant insights and close readings are delivered on his many return trips to Bodega Bay, the decrepit Bates’s manse, and Judy Barton’s neon-illuminated room at the York Hotel in Vertigo.
Fiennes’s one trick (and granted, it’s an effective one) is to do this literally, casually placing Zizek within mock-ups of the scenes that he has discussed. We see Zizek in Melanie Daniels’s skiff puttering across Bodega Bay; next he’s alongside Regan’s bed from The Exorcist; later he’s speaking from the fruit cellar of Norman Bates’s house, or Dorothy Vallens’s apartment in Blue Velvet, or the dimensionless white field where Neo instantaneously summons weapons in The Matrix. This playful technique helps cut through some of the density of Zizek’s more arcane points, and occasionally, we catch the man off guard, cracking cheesy Freudian one-liners about the inherent obscenity of tulips (while watering a garden a la the opening scene of Blue Velvet).
It is not just that Zizek is as well-versed in Lacan as he is in Hitchcock – or that he casts his critical eye toward topics both high and low – that has made him such a popular figure, even with nonacademics. (Zizek is, as far as I know, the only intellectual to be interviewed for Abercrombie and Fitch’s now-defunct Quarterly). This intellectually challenging, often entertaining, and at times draining lecture-posing-as-a-documentary proves at least one thing: Zizek’s combination of disarming charisma and utter seriousness makes him as entrancing as his arguments are compelling.
THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA
Thurs/3-Fri/4, 7 p.m.; Sat/5, 2 and 7 p.m.; Sun/6, 2 p.m.; $6-$8
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room
701 Mission, SF
(415) 978-2787
> paulr@sfbg.com Although restaurants can be, and often are described as being, sexy, they aren’t really sexy in that way, the people way. So far as we know, and for reasons that I need not get into, they don’t actually indulge. Which means that Piccino Cafe, a petite jewel of a restaurant that opened a few months ago on a quiet Dogpatch side street between the furies of I-280 and Third Street, cannot be the love child of, say, Universal Cafe and A16. Although such a union is flatly impossible – Universal and A16 have never met, never been alone together – one can’t stop wondering. Piccino’s serious yet warm industrial look (stainless steel, blond wood, glass), the almost tissue-thin pizza crusts coming out of the kitchen, and the ingredients obtained from impeccable sources all seem profoundly familiar if not familial.http://www.youtube.com/ If Piccino were a child, we might have our answer by waiting for it to grow up a bit. But, as the name suggests, the restaurant is tiny, with just a half dozen or so tables (not counting sidewalk seats) in a space largely given over to the kitchen. It’s almost like a catering kitchen or the original Citizen Cake; the setup seems tilted more toward making food than serving it to people, and we did notice quite a few takeout pizza boxes being whisked away by people who clearly live in the changing neighborhood. But despite the tight space, service is sharp; each table is swiftly brought a Straus Organic Creamery milk bottle filled with water (chilled but not filtered) and a plate of crispy flatbreads, and even at the outdoor tables, one’s needs are continually seen to. It is a fact that sometimes restaurants, like children and even love children, do grow up: Delfina began in quarters no roomier than Piccino’s and is now an order of magnitude bigger, plus an adjoining pizzeria. Part of Piccino’s charm is its snugness, but the food is so good that demand is bound to raise the issue of expansion sooner or later, probably sooner. While that question simmers, wedge yourself in at one of the knee-to-knee tables, pour yourself a tumbler of water from your personal stash, have a bite of flatbread, and scan the brief menu. What do you see? A selection of pizzas, of course, including such staples as margherita and napoletana ($9.25) – the latter swabbed with blood-red tomato sauce and dotted with halved black olives and bits of anchovy – along with special pies that vary according to season and inspiration. The people at the next table could be overheard urgently discussing a pizza topped with, among other things, speck. "Maybe it’s fish," one of them said doubtfully. Her companion furrowed his brow. Only moments before, we too had furrowed our brows in bafflement about speck before asking our server. His answer: smoked prosciutto. The speck pie ($10.75), a bianco, was also topped with fresh arugula and mild white cheese. Since we like arugula, we’d started with a simple arugula salad ($7) decorated with Parmesan shavings and drizzled with balsamic vinegar – a simple and perfect combination, like an unforgettable piece of chamber music. A weightier opener is the antipasti platter ($8.50), a blending of some usual suspects – country pate with Dijon mustard, thin coins of salume, black and green olives (mind the pits!) – along with a few special guests, including a chickpea spread that wasn’t hummus (coarser of texture, no tahini) and a bouquet of pickled baby carrots and radishes. There was flatbread on the side, of course, for clean-up duty. The evening menu differs from its midday confrere mainly in the addition of a few nonbready main dishes. We did not try the evening’s risotto, though a plate that arrived at the next table (opposite the speck-flummoxed folk) looked fabulously creamy. We did try the duck confit ($14), a gently crisped leg and thigh half-recumbent on a bed of dandelion greens given some sweetness and crunch by sections of pixie tangerines and rubbly little bits of crushed hazelnuts. Duck confit is one of those ideal dishes for restaurants – it’s elegant and slightly exotic, highly skill- and time-intensive, with most of the work being done days beforehand and not much to do at the finish besides crisping the skin and warming the meat through – and Piccino’s version does honor to the kitchen. I wouldn’t have minded some lentils on the side, though maybe they’re considered cliche now, or maybe Americans just don’t have much use for legumes other than the peanut. And even with peanuts, we prefer the artifice of grinding them into paste. There was at lunch an interesting minestrone ($5.50) that consisted largely of a mocha-colored cranberry-bean puree in which orecchiette floated like inner tubes on a muddy summer river. Perhaps legumes are more acceptable to the American palate if pulverized so as to be unrecognizable? And where there is soup, there is likely to be sandwich: of salume cotto ($8.75), slices of warm cured meat on grilled country bread. With arugula! And a nice heap of vinegar-modulated lentil salad on the side, with the legumes daringly left intact. The advent of Piccino tells us which way the wind is blowing in the Dogpatch. In the evening the neighborhood’s streets are quiet (all the traffic is on the freeway a few blocks west and Third Street a few blocks east), and the houses show a friendly dowdiness, like a grandmother’s dresses. But the restaurant’s crowds are young and knowing, and if they’re not sure what speck is, they expect to find out. * PICCINO CAFE Mon.-Wed., 7 a.m.-3 p.m.; Thurs.-Fri., 7 a.m.-8:30 p.m.; Sat., 8 a.m.-8:30 p.m.; Sun. (coffee bar only), 8 a.m.-3 p.m. 801 22nd St., SF (415) 824-4224 Beer and wine Cash only (credit cards pending) Noisy Wheelchair accessible
Piccino Cafe
YouTube – Broadcast Yourself.
Homecoming
CHEAP EATS There’s only one thing in my refrigerator, and nothing at all in the nest. It’s come to this, then: two chickens left, and one of them has developed a taste for eggs.
Two weeks ago today when I flapped my wings (venison lasagna + Ativan = liftoff, plus or minus an airplane ticket), I never felt more like I needed a vacation from my life. And yesterday evening, upon touching down again at SFO, I burst into tears, grateful to be not only alive on Earth, but alive in my exact life. And dying to see Sockywonk and Weirdo the Cat and my newest and littlest love, Z.Z. de la Cooter.
Z.Z. being 15 years and 11 months away from a driver’s license, and Weirdo the Cat being a cat, Sockywonk was the one who I called, from a pay phone, as soon as I stepped off the plane.
"I’ll be right there," she said.
I got my luggage and went outside into California and waited, blinking, my mascara smeared and swirly. My neighbor from the plane walked past – an older-man businessmanperson who had stared at spreadsheets on his laptop next to me as intently as I’d been staring at pictures of little Z.Z. on mine, trying to beat back the panic with incessant cuteness.
We hadn’t exchanged more than four words on the plane – "excuse me" and "thank you" – but now he gave me a warm, almost intimate smile. I smiled back. For all I know, he has a fear of flying too.
The Wonk was in a bit of a postsurgical state still, it turned out, and I was more on drugs than she was. Plus starving. So she could hardly even talk, she was so busy being such a good driver, and it was all I could do to sit up straight, with my hand in her head of half-inch hair growth, and sort of slobber.
What I’m getting at is that last night, at any rate, the two dogs in the backseat would have been more qualified than either of us to choose a restaurant.
Me and Sockywonk, it so happens, are two of the last four people on the planet without cell phones, or else we might have maybe thought to call someone for help. It’s easy enough to think that now, fed, slept, and caffeinated. But yesterday . . .
And anyway my brother Phenomenon, my own go-to one-phone-call bastion of all-around competency, was unreachably out of the country.
Innit funny, though, how notorious goofs like me and Socky tend to have siblings whose specialty it is to take care of bidness? Just fucking get the job done? For lack of any better ideas, the Wonk drove us to her house and parked. When we went inside, I kid you not, at 8, 8:30 in the evening, her visiting sis from Florida, Sisterwonk, was under the sink in the kitchen, hammering. On her visit so far she’d already tiled the kitchen floor, which had looked more like a garage than an apartment, as I recall, rigged a new light over the dining room table, and painted the walls a cheerful yellow.
I knew immediately that, dinnerwise, we were in good hands. Sure enough: "Why don’t you get a burrito?" she suggested, without even scratching her head.
You’d have thought that we’d have thought of that, being the San Franciscans.
"Mexicana’s good," Sisterwonk said, anticipating my next question.
I looked at Socky, who had already found parking, and she nodded. "It’s right around the corner," she said. Less than two blocks. As easy a walk as two junkied goofs have ever had to walk. And just like that I had a new favorite taqueria.
Mexicana! Who knew? They steam their tortillas, but the chips are good, and the salsa’s good, and I can vouch for the spicy chipotle chicken burrito, about a third of which is the one thing in my refrigerator right now.
Probably I could have knocked it off last night. But I think instinctively I knew, deep down below the Ativan, how sad it would be to come home to an empty refrigerator.
For lunch I’m going to make me one big pan-spun homemade flour tortilla, and I’m going to chop up and reheat last night’s burrito, wrapper and all. As far as I know, it will be the world’s first ever burrito butt burrito. And I can’t tell you how happy I am about that. *
CASA MEXICANA
Daily: 11 a.m.-10 p.m.
3917 24th St., SF
(415) 648-0477
Takeout available
Beer
MC/V
Wheelchair accessible
The corrections
> andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
Love your column. That said, at the risk of sounding like a p.c. crap-spewing psycho, I am going to take an issue with your sentence, "Kind of the way that the single mothers at the playground cannot stop themselves from crawling all over married men who show up there with a baby" ["Quid Pro Shmo," 1/10/07]. I see your point, and obviously there are such women, and they are perhaps plentiful enough to make their own category. I’m a single mom, though, and I’d never, ever, ever do such a thing, and I’m sure there are many others like me. I think I would have appreciated the word "some" prior to "single mothers" in your response. I know it might seem like semantics. But really, my life as a single mom – including the socializing on the playgrounds with married women – is hard enough without my favorite columnist perpetuating myths of all single moms wanting other women’s men just because they oh so easily fall for nurture-exhibiting dads.
Love,
Sad Fan
Dear Fan:
You don’t sound psycho at all! I sounded sloppy. I have to admit that after first reading your letter I just assumed you had to be wrong – no way could I have written that line and failed to modify "single mothers" with "some" or "You know the ones I mean." I meant to imply the "some," but apparently I didn’t ply it well enough.
I was actually writing not about single mothers but about women who are attracted to nurturing men, which is not at all a bad thing, especially when you consider the sort of men some other women are attracted to. Just to be clear, the playground thing really does happen. The men I know who’ve reported getting hit on while out with their babies were all wearing wedding rings too, and all were bemused to find that anyone would take them for anything like available in any way. If there are also married guys who take off their rings to take the baby to the park or single guys who borrow a baby and hit the playground circuit and aren’t fictional characters probably played by Hugh Grant, they don’t want to meet me. I stopped carrying pepper spray a while back, but I could start.
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
Regarding your answer to your reader who has trouble maintaining an erection while wearing a condom, you made a number of useful suggestions but omitted what I think is an important one: try a bigger condom. For years I struggled to get a condom on and maintain an erection, fumbling, stretching, squeezing, and fretting when I just wanted to be fucking. It wasn’t until my late 20s that a girlfriend suggested I try the bigger variety. I was skeptical, as the only other erections I’d seen were massive porno cocks, and I knew at a little over six inches I was nothing special in the length department. They don’t tell you in sex ed that it’s really girth that matters, at least when considering condom candidates. I’ve since tried every large-wide condom that they carry, and I highly recommend Lifestyles Large (they happen to fit me perfectly, but it’s obviously going to depend on details of size and shape). I wish somebody had told me this a long time ago, as it literally changed my life. Not only can I get the condom on easily and stay hard until the job is done, the increased blood flow means I have way more sensation too. Hope this helps.
Love,
Wide Load
Dear Wide:
It’s true! They don’t tell you it’s the width that matters, and I wish they would. I don’t know where my brain was when I was listing all the options and forgetting the condom-width issue, since "it’s the width that counts" is kind of a pet fact of mine. Length may get more press, and it does have its uses, but they are somewhat rarefied. It’s width that does most of the heavy lifting, and it’s width that’s most likely to be missed if absent.
Sex educators, myself included, love to surprise people by emphasizing just how numb to touch the supposedly supersensitive vagina is once you get past the vestibule and, um, front parlor. Even up front, we have more receptors for stretching than for stroking. Then there are all the goodies collectively thought of as the G-spot – paraurethral sponge, Skene’s glands, "crurae" of the clitoris, and so on – which often languish in obscurity or just lie there thinking of England until something curved or just plain thick enough to arouse a response out of them arrives. Width roolz! (Length, by contrast, necessarily droolz.) I hope you realize, now that your equipment problem has been solved, what you’ve got there is, as they say, not a bug but a feature.
Love,
Andrea
Andrea Nemerson teaches sex and communication skills with San Francisco Sex Information. She has been a theater artist, a women’s health educator, and a composting instructor, but not at the same time. She is considering offering a workshop on how to have and rear twins without going crazy, since she’s currently doing that too.
Stop getting things done
> annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION Among business-oriented tech nerds, there is an acronym that is a cult: GTD. It stands for "getting things done," and it comes from the title of a popular time-management book by productivity coach David Allen. Not only has Allen turned GTD into a multimillion-dollar consulting and advice business, but he’s also infected the hearts and minds of an entire generation trying to work as fast as the processors in their computers do. At its heart, the GTD philosophy is simple: list your tasks ahead of time, and complete them as systematically as possible. In the end, you’ll work more quickly, zooming through your life the way you zoom through your e-mail in-box.
But for those of us who confront bulging e-mail boxes and multiple, multistage projects every morning, GTD can become a freaky addiction. We’re never fast enough. That’s why some GTD solutions go beyond the friendly kind you’ll see on productivity blogs such as Lifehacker and 43 Folders, which are devoted to finding ingenious, technical solutions to get around work-blocking procrastination.
Possibly the weirdest example of extreme GTD can be found in a recent book, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, by a guy named Tim Ferriss. The book combines two biz-geek obsessions, saving time and getting rich, which is probably why his Web site lists endorsements from tons of people, including "Lazer Tag consultant" Stephen Key and Firefox cofounder Blake Ross.
I met Ferriss, an affable if slightly overenthusiastic fellow, at the South by Southwest Interactive conference. His book hadn’t come out yet, but he was already trying to convert the masses to his "lifestyle design" solution. Unlike a typical GTD plan, his book is also about glamor: he preaches the art of taking "mini-retirements," trips to different countries where you can have fun while still working occasionally (this is after you’ve somehow convinced your bosses to let you work remotely).
At various points while reading Ferriss’s book I was reminded of Steve Martin’s old routine "How to Make a Million Dollars and Not Pay Taxes." His solution? First make a million dollars. And then when the tax people come around, just tell them you forgot to pay. It sounds good, but the problem is implementation. In a chapter called "Outsourcing Your Life," Ferriss tips you off to his best time-saving solution: hire cheap labor in the developing world to save yourself time and money. In fact, this is eerily like all of his solutions, such as living in Thailand while working for a US company to give yourself a mini-retirement and grow richer.
Ferriss’s GTD plan is so extreme that it winds up revealing the dark side of productivity mania. Many of his time-saving techniques depend on making other people work more. For example, Ferriss interviews a guy for his book who saves time by hiring staffers at a company in Bangalore who do all his research for him, answer his e-mails, and even send his wife an apology when the two of them have a fight. Suddenly, this guy has a lot more time and feels more productive. I’m not sure that when GTD guru Allen writes about delegating tasks he means that you assign your work to other people. Ferriss’s GTD fiends may be getting four-hour workweeks, but it’s only because three women in Bangalore are working 70 hours a week.
My fantasy, on considering the extreme end of GTD culture, is that more and more people will begin following Ferriss’s advice. Get things done by outsourcing all your work to the developing world, so that soon women in Bangalore and China have access to all your personal correspondence, financial data, and work-related activities. This could possibly create the conditions for the first-ever bloodless but violent revolution. One day, people in the United States and Europe will discover that all their data is in the hands of angry workers who want to do the GTD thing their own way. They want their own four-hour workweeks, and they’re going to use all your data to get them.
It would be the perfect demise for a data-obsessed, time-obsessed culture. Deprived of our data, we’ll have all the time in the world. But of course, if we want to live, we’ll have to start working again. And this time we’ll have to work the old-fashioned way: by doing it ourselves. *
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who saves time by talking and sticking her feet in her mouth at the same time.
Ellis Act crisis
OPINION Between 2004 and 2005, Chetcuti and Associates, a Walnut Creek real estate development company, bought eight Mission District apartment buildings. Within the first few weeks of ownership, the company served all the tenants in four buildings with Ellis Act eviction notices. In the next two months, three of the other buildings were Ellised. The company held on to the eighth building for a year before it gave those tenants Ellis notices.
The same is true throughout the city: John Hickey Brokerage, another out-of-town real estate company, gave Lola McKay (who died in 2000 while fighting her Ellis eviction) a notice within weeks after buying the building and then did the same to tenants in a North Beach apartment building – evicting those tenants just five days after a purchase deal closed.
In fact, more than half of all Ellis Act evictions in San Francisco are done by real estate speculators who have owned their buildings for less than six months. Almost one quarter are done by speculators who have owned the building for less than a month (and many of those are done in the first hours or days of ownership).
The buildings are then often sold as tenancies in common – essentially, as condos for people much wealthier than the ones who were evicted.
Rampant real estate speculation is bad enough on its own. What makes it worse is that this pattern is also an abuse of everything the Ellis Act was intended to be: a way for long-term landlords to be able to get out of the rental business and retire. When the Ellis Act was passed in 1985, its proponents said its purpose was to allow a landlord "to go out of business when he or she is convinced that they are no longer willing to devote the time, accept the frustration, expose themselves to the liability and other factors of continuing to be a landlord."
Apparently, companies such as Chetcuti and Associates and John Hickey Brokerage decided within days and weeks that they just couldn’t devote the time to or accept the frustration of being a landlord anymore and were compelled to evict the tenants. And that’s the case for hundreds of other real estate investors, many of whom are getting tired of being landlords within days of buying rental property.
Senate Bill 464 – which the State Senate will vote on any day now – would rectify this abuse and return the Ellis Act to its original intent. This bill simply says that a landlord must own property for at least five years before using the Ellis Act to evict tenants. It’s simple and fair, and it hurts only real estate speculators.
The vote is expected to be close – and unbelievably, the bill may not pass because a senator from San Francisco, Leland Yee, has indicated he may oppose it. No other city in California has been hit harder by the Ellis Act than San Francisco – yet our very own senator may kill this bill.
Thousands of residents here have been evicted under the Ellis Act, most of them senior or disabled. Ellis evictions are a crisis in San Francisco and are destroying lives and neighborhoods and communities.
Please call (415-557-7857) or fax (415-557-7864) Sen. Yee to ask him to support SB 464. *
Ted Gullicksen
Ted Gullicksen is executive director of the San Francisco Tenants Union.