SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Andrea, McAllister and Van Ness
Tell us about your look: “I always buy cheap clothes, but I try to make sure they’re unique.”
Fashion
RIP, Parkway Speakeasy Theater
Say it ain’t so! Oakland’s Parkway Theater announced this week that its doors will close Sunday, March 22. According to the theater’s web site:
“After more than twelve years of serving the great cultural crossroad of Oakland, the Parkway Speakeasy Theater will be closing at the end of business day, Sunday March 22, 2009.
From African Diaspora to Thrillville to lesbian fashion shows and educational porn, the Parkway has offered an eclectic array of movies and events. It was the first theater in California to offer food, beer and wine service in a lounge style movie theater. With a nudge or a push from the community, there was little programming the Parkway theater would not try in order to better be a community center and a safe haven for diverse ideas. The Parkway brought Baby Brigade for the shuttered and abandoned parents of newborns, the first international black gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender film festival and Sunday Salon, a free event for cultural and community enhancement. We, at the Parkway Speakeasy Theater, are deeply proud of the Parkway and will profoundly miss serving its community. Thank you for your patronage.”
Fortunately, all is not entirely lost — the Parkway owners still have their Cerrito Speakeasy Theater, which, like the Parkway, has beer and pizza (and sandwiches with cheeky names: “The Zombie Cow,” anyone?) on the menu, along with new films and special events, including the ever-cool monthly B-movie celebration, Thrillville. It’s also very BART-friendly — literally just a handful of blocks and a Bed, Bath, and Beyond parking lot’s length from the station.
The Parkway closes down with a trio of standout films from 2008: The Wrester, Revolutionary Road, and Let the Right One In (your choice — five bucks!), plus a movie about Lucha Libre that looks pretty unmissable (seven bucks for this one). Head over and show your support Sun/22, or hit up the Cerrito in the coming months to make sure it keeps unspoolin’ films and pourin’ pitchers of PBR.
Appetite: Caffeinated Comics, Chocolate Salon, Masa’s at a discount, and more
Chocolate time! See “events” below
As long-time San Francisco resident and writer, I’m passionate about this city and obsessed with finding and exploring its best food-and-drink spots, deals, events and news, in every neighborhood and cuisine. I started with my own service and monthly food/drink/travel newsletter, The Perfect Spot, and am thrilled to share up-to-the minute news with you from the endless goings-on in our fair city. View the last installment of Appetite here
————
NEW RESTAURANT & CAFE OPENINGS
Caffeinated Comics, the breakfast of champions
Four Barrel coffee, free wi-fi, comic books and donuts? Could this possibly all be in one place? It is now with Caffeinated Comics, SF’s first comic book/coffee shop rolled into one. The Outer Mission shop is a bright red, orange and yellow space where you can sift through superhero memorabilia or check out DC or Marvel’s latest comic books, all while sipping a high-quality espresso. (Note: there’s also affogatos using neighbor, Mitchell’s, legendary ice cream). CaffCom’s applied for green certification with green lighting, building materials and energy efficient freezers and fridges. Holy caffeinated geekdom, Batman.
Caffeinated Comics
Weekdays 7am-6pm
Weekends 9:30am-5pm
3188 Mission Street
415-829-7530
www.caffcom.com
Livin’ La Dolce Vita at Pizzanostra
Jocelyn Bulow of the Chez Papa and Chez Maman restaurant group and Italian chef, Giovanni Aginolfi (who was cooking pizzas in Nice, France, prior to coming to SF), join forces for a new pizzeria/osteria on Potrero Hill called Pizzanostra. Aginolfi placed sixth in the World Pizza Championship and now we can get ’em right here. There are two themes to this restaurant: a pizzeria serving Aginolfi’s famed pies, and an osteria with a menu of antipasti, foccacias, salumi, pastas, gelatos and Italian wines. The outdoor sidewalk terrace will be a huge hit on sunny days for filling up on bruschetta topped with eggplant, prosciutto, mozerella and tomato, a salad of celery hearts and fennel, or pizzas covered in lamb sausage and egg or clams and prawns. This is la dolce vita realized.
Pizzanostra
300 De Haro Street
415-558-9493
www.pizzanostrasf.com
———
EVENTS
March 17: Screening and Iyemon Cha Tea Reception as part of the Asian American Film Fest
Asian film screening and tea tasting sound good? Iyemon Cha is a one-of-a-kind organic bottled green tea made at the historic Fukujuen tea house in Kyoto, Japan. Only recently available in our city, the tea and complimentary appetizers will be served at an exclusive pre-screening reception you have to sign up for online. At the reception you’ll meet the director, Dave Boyle, and cast of that night’s film, “White on Rice.” Consider it a culturally fun education in tea and Asian film.
5:30pm reception at Bar Bistro; 6:45pm Film Screening
Free for pre-screening reception but must register on website ahead of time
Film screening, $10: www.festival.asianamericanmedia.org/2009.
Sundance Kabuki Theatre
1881 Post Street
www.iyemonchaevents.com
March 21: Spend your Saturday at the Third Annual SF International Chocolate Salon
The SF International Chocolate Salon is back for it’s annual showdown of over fifty gourmet chocolate vendors covering 30,000 square feet of ground. Let’s see, spending a Saturday sampling rich chocolates, velvety wines and all things chocolate? Can do. There’s chef and author talks, demos, chocolate fashion and body painting (?!) and wine pairings, so you won’t be bored. I would concur with the well-known adage, “I never met a piece of chocolate I didn’t like”, and this event will surely confirm it.
10am-6pm
$20 advance; $25 at the door
Fort Mason Center: Herbst Pavilion
99 Marina Boulevard
www.sfchocolatesalon.com
———-
DRINK NEWS
Adesso opens in Oakland – finally, a sports bar for cocktilians
Jon Smulewitz of longtime Piedmont Ave. Italian restaurant, Dopo, just opened an Italian-chic sports bar (yes… chic, Italian and sports). Adesso may have a Foosball table and flat screens, but it also has 15 drinks assembled by Jay Kosmas of New York City’s Employees Only, an industry insiders’ culinary cocktail hang-out. In a casual, mod space, imbibe cocktails or Italian wines while pulling up a seat at the bar… salumi bar that is. You heard right: salumi bar and foosball, all in one place.
4395 Piedmont Avenue
Oakland, CA 94611
510-601-0305
———–
DEALS
Sens gets special
Sens: $19 lunch special with entree, dessert and a 12 oz. beer
Sens, Embarcadero’s Mediterranean Rustic Chic restaurant overlooks Embarcadero Plaza from big, picturesque windows. I enjoy the fresh dishes but find the place pricey in general, though I have a reason now to return for their new $19 lunch special, with soda or 12 oz. beer, entree and dessert. The menu rotates weekly with recent dishes including a lamb and feta meatball sandwich on rosemary ciabatta with sweet potato chips and mesclun greens and a lush chocolate bread pudding for dessert. Sounds like my kind of lunch hour.
Monday-Friday 11:30am-2:30pm Lunch; 3-7:30pm Happy Hour; 5:30-10pm Dinner
Saturday 5pm-11pm
4 Embarcadero Center, Promenade Level
415-362-0645
www.sens-sf.com
Masa’s makes fine dining affordable
Masa’s is one of SF’s most revered fine dining destinations for more than 25 years, but set menus run $105 for six courses or $155 for nine courses per person. Yeah… definitely a special occasion splurge at best. But Masa’s is feeling the economic times, too, responding with something they’ve never done before: offer a three course menu for $55 on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays for early bird diners. Exec chef, Gregory Short, serves dishes like roasted beets en terrine or potato agnolotti with fava beans and black trumpet mushrooms. Pastry chef, John McKee, won’t leave you hanging on dessert either, with delectables like a fleur de sel caramel bon bon or Winter citrus tart. An ideal chance to try out this upscale dining mecca at a “discount”.
Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays 5:30-6:30pm
$55 three-course menu; $30 for three wine pairings
648 Bush Street
415-989-7154
www.masasrestaurant.com
SXSW: Explosions as Sahm, Floyd are toasted, the Bronx pounds, Tara Jane O’Neil tears it, Explode into Colors does just that
Back to the basics: The Bronx whip it out March 18. All photos by Kimberly Chun.
Get away from the grip-and-grin events and rambles through parties that offer free drinks and barbecue (though Jackpine Social Club’s Nick Tangborn supposedly threw an ace bash yesterday for ex-Parkside honcho Sean’s Batter Blaster pancake spray product) – there’s music out there if you seek it out. The corporate sponsors may be relatively absent, but there’s still plenty of intrigue, sonically, if you seek it out: PJ Harvey and John Parish, J. Tillman of Fleet Foxes going solo, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Blk Jck, We Have Band, et al.
One great budding band of women: Portland, Ore., trio Explode Into Colors. An all-power two-drum approach draws from the Slits and Gang of Four to fashion impassioned, sinewy primal punk. Fully formed and in full possession of their own voice. The group played March 18’s Finally Punk-curated all-ages music-made-by-women show at Ms. Bea’s, which also included Pocahaunted, Yellow Fever, Micachu, and the East Bay’s Splinters.
Boy meets girls: Explode Into Colors.
Street Threads: Look of the Day
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Anna (and Kona), 20th Street and Valencia
Tell us about your look: “I always dress to be comfortable and by my mood. Sometimes it’s jeans, sometimes it’s a mini skirt … and some days it’s a clown suit.”
More meaner, more cleaner
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
"We’re not elitists," asserts Nick Catchdubs, co-founder of Brooklyn dance label Fool’s Gold. In a conference call with business partner A-Trak, he describes Fool’s Gold fans as a sea of hip-hop dudes, skinny-jeans-electro kids, super DJ nerds and Urban Outfitters girls. "The tempos and the beats-per-minute are the only governing factor," adds A-Trak.
You could say that Fool’s Gold is fomenting a cultural moment. After years of dismissing it as cheesy and "gay," rap fans have finally, tentatively, learned to accept dance music. Kanye West landed a number one hit with "Stronger" by remixing Daft Punk’s 2001 "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger." A-Trak, the other co-founder of Fool’s Gold, is Kanye’s tour DJ. And Washington, DC rapper Wale drove the Internet nuts with his remix of Justice’s "D.A.N.C.E." Catchdubs mixed 100 Miles and Running, the Wale mixtape which featured that viral hit.
Fool’s Gold works with many of the era’s players: Kid Sister, who scored the label’s first successes with clever pop-raps "Damn Girl" and "Pro Nails" (and is A-Trak’s girlfriend); Trackademicks, the Yay Area electro-funk producer-rapper who celebrated the release of the single "Enjoy What You Do" at SF nightspot Vessel last month; and Treasure Fingers, the Atlanta DJ who scored a disco-house smash last year with "Cross The Dancefloor." Its biggest hit to date, though, has been Kid Cudi’s "Day ‘N’ Nite," a lonely-stoner gem that mixes Cudi’s off-key harmonizing against winsome electro melancholy. A-Trak doesn’t have exact figures, but he places digital sales at around 100,000, which he rightly describes as "cool for an indie like us."
Kid Cudi was the first Fool’s Gold artist to win over difficult-to-please hip-hop blogs, which sometimes ridiculed Kid Sister as too fluffy and trendy (perhaps in part because she’s a woman). During Kid Sister’s run of singles in 2007, which eventually landed her a major label deal with Downtown Records, skeptics didn’t know what to make of her or Fool’s Gold — was she some kind of hipster rapper, and was Fool’s Gold just a goofy imprint for fashion-challenged scenesters?
"When we first started the label, we would do all these weird interviews, like, ‘Talk about the hipster rap movement.’ Just bizarre interviews where people would talk about your jeans and sneakers and shit," says A-Trak. "One year later, we hardly ever get those questions. It takes a minute for stuff to assimilate. I think people know that some stuff is trendy and is going to float away like all trends do. But a lot of times it’s just culture at work: ideas coming out and getting assimilated, and then people move on to the next shit."
Fool’s Gold’s greatest ambassador may be A-Trak. A DJ star since the age of 15, when he shocked the then-thriving turntablist world by winning the 1997 DMC World Championships, A-Trak has grown into an influential artist. In the next two months he’ll release DJ mixes for two reputed dance labels, Thrive (Infinity +1, due March 31) and Fabric (Fabriclive.31, set for May 5). His transition from scratch-happy hip-hop head to genre-blurring tastemaker is one that Fool’s Gold might follow.
"The whole aesthetic of Fool’s Gold is based on what Nick and I play in our DJ sets," says A-Trak. "What we put out is really varied, but it all kind of makes sense."
A-TRAK
with Trackademics, Vin Sol
Sat/21, 9pm, $13
Paradise Lounge
1501 Folsom St, SF
Street Threads: Look of the Day
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Kenya, 19th Street and Guerrero
Tell us about your look: “No comment.”
Street Threads: Look of the Day
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Charlotte, 18th Street and Valencia
Tell us about your look: “My friends call me a trendsetter.”
Ron Paul in queer Libertarian sex nonscandal
By Marke B.
Fine, yes, we’re all wearing out our French tips awaiting Borat comic genius Sascha Baron Cohen’s new Austrian thuper-gay fashion disaster epic flick, Bruno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt — and after a wee hits-reel preview at SXSW in Austin and a couple of test screenings deep in the bowels of Harvey Weinstein, the press is picking up on every juicy detail it can squeeze out of attendees.
Like this tantalizing and/or vomit inducing piece just posted by Christopher Beam to Slate, in which one of the test screeners describes a near miss of giant-hairy-backed-dude-nude-wrestling proportions. In the Bruno movie, Cohen wheedles Libertarian leader and noted gerbil Ron Paul into an potentially compromising situation:
Street Threads: Look of the Day
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Zoe, 18th Street and Valencia
Tell us about your look: “I wait for my friends to try out new looks and then I try them myself.”
Street Threads: Look of the Day
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Janice, 19th Street and Valencia
Tell us about your look: “I dress for comfort, always.”
Street Threads: Look of the Day
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Brandon, 21st Street and Guerrero
Tell us about your look: “I like to put on clothes. I get most of my clothes at thrift stores.”
Designer Dish: Pop Junkie’s spring sugar rush
By Laura Peach
Old West meets Studio 54 retro with Pop Junkie’s “Disco Roosters” Tee.
This week, we chatted up local master printmakers Aaron Feiger and Ashley Marcinczyk about the sugary sweet, super sexy San Francisco-inspired designs they’ll be pulling off the press in the next few weeks. Their whimsical T-shirts sprouted into screenprinting project Pop Junkie. The funky, fun tees and totes are popping up not only on the streets of our fair city, but also across the country and in fashion forward, graphic-obsessed Japan. Here’s what the design duo had to say about their work, life, and love of San Francisco style.
SFBG: So… what are you working on right now? Tell us about the new spring line you’re currently cultivating.
Aaron: This season we’ve done our own take on a Barberella theme. I watched it over and over as a kid—I was only 7 or 8 years old. Looking back I can’t believe my mom let me watch something with so many sexual references. We’re adding some geometric shapes into these designs too.
Ashley: I’m making some re-usable beer bags. Everyone’s out at Dolores Park brownbagging it, and I thought it would be great to have an attractive, eco-friendly option. Our homewares will be expanding: we’ll be making more pillows and bags, and coming out with some laser-cut candleholders.
Street Threads: Look of the Day
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Jessica Lanyadoo, writer of Psychic Dream Astrology, 23rd Street and Valencia
Tell us about your look: “I dress according to my mood, always, and I believe in glasses.”
Pineapple express?
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Hollywood’s hitherto stereotypical or simply indifferent portrayal of Asians progressed, albeit in one-step-forward-two-steps-back fashion. (Notably horrifying was Mickey Rooney’s 1961 yellowface caricature as Holly Golightly’s "Japanese" neighbor Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.)
South Pacific (1958), Flower Drum Song (1961), The World of Suzie Wong (1960), and several Sam Fuller–directed pulp actioners (like 1959’s The Crimson Kimono) promoted tolerance and understanding, however compromised they might look now. Nor is sincerity an issue in 1963’s Diamond Head, which gets a rare revival screening at this year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. This glossy Panavision soap opera, based on a pulpy novel (Peter Gilman’s Such Sweet Thunder), offers a perfect mixed-message read of Hollywood’s hesitant multiculturalist liberalism at the time.
Charlton Heston, then at the height of box-office stardom (concurrently a significant civil rights activist, before his infamous conservativism later in life) plays the politically aspirational, bullwhip-wielding macho Richard "King" Howland, ruler of a vast Hawaiian pineapple ranch. He’s got a borderline incestuous interest in preventing kid sister Sloane (Yvette Mimieux) from marrying "half-caste" Paul (teen idol James Darren in light-cocoaface). That intervention is intervened by Paul’s big brother Dr. Dean (West Side Story‘s George Chakiris, two years later, again with the dusky "ethnic" makeup). Meanwhile Heston’s "Dick" (ahem) hypocritically keeps mistress Mai Chen (a stilted Frances Nuyen, famed from South Pacific and ridiculously self-serving protests against 1993’s The Joy Luck Club when her big scene was cut). Blackmail, jealousy, arguably accidental death, and provocative Caucasian hula-dancing likewise figure into the contrived melodramatics.
Diamond Head sports the sort of juicy-coarse plotting that used to be called "claptrap." It’s not wholly camp yet. But the widescreen gloss, corny emoting, and sheer presence of über-alpha-male Heston at his Sir Smirksalot peak are getting there, fast. Buried somewhere in these vanilla histrionics are fairly sharp digs against ethnic prejudice. Mimieux even says, "Someday all bloods will be mixed and all races gone. Where’s the loss?" — a remarkably hopeful statement for 1963. Or today. Diamond Head semi-embarrasses now. Yet it also tries admirably hard to get over its inherent miscegenationalist sensationalism, which does count for something.
DIAMOND HEAD
Sun/15, noon, $11
Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF
THE SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL March 12–22. Main venues are the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Camera 12 Cinemas, 201 S. Second St., San Jose. Tickets (most shows $11) are available at www.asianamericanmedia.org. For this week’s schedule, see film listings.
His royal highness
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
REVIEW Yinka Shonibare’s 1998 photographic essay Diary of a Victorian Dandy, Member of the Order of the British Empire runs like clockwork.
At 11 a.m., Shonibare the nobleman is shown waking and then donning a nightcap in his gilded bedroom; he’s surrounded by four ruddy-cheeked buxom maids and a pale, thin butler, who each cater to his every whim. At 2 p.m., dressed in a three-piece blue-gray suit, he tends to business in his private library. Busts of Greek and Roman conquerors sit atop mahogany bookshelves, observing while high-collared, porcine sycophants with handlebar mustaches congratulate Shonibare on squandering what’s left of his father’s fortune.
By 3 p.m., Shonibare’s nobleman has retired to another bedroom, where — sporting a salmon-pink velvet vest and matching satin tie — he reclines on a chaise lounge with a glass of red wine. An undressed brunette woman on his left caresses the vest, her eyes turned upward as if she’s entranced by his wealth and power. A red-haired girl to his right runs her fingers through his hair. In the background, a woman dressed in a hoop skirt fellates one of Shonibare’s sycophants, another woman lies at the foot of the bed, and still another looks bored as she’s buggered by one of Shonibare’s consorts.
Five p.m. brings a rousing game of billiards in the parlor. The day’s activities end at seven, with white ties, tails, and candelabras in a plush dining room replete with red velvet curtains and gilded framed oil portraits of aristocrats in powdered wigs.
Shonibare is a heavily bearded, 46-year-old Nigerian. This hairy black man, assuming the role of a dandy, places himself at the center of all his photos, reveling in absurd glory. "Historically, the dandy is usually an outsider whose only way through is his wit and style," Shonibare explains, in a text within the monograph Yinka Shonibare MBE (Prestel USA, 208 pages, $55), edited by Rachel Kent. "His apparent lack of seriousness of course belies an absolute seriousness, and that attracts me to the dandy as a figure of mobility who upsets the social order of things."
Shonibare has upset the British social order and gained mobility — including an exquisitely absurd and very real royal appointment — by creating Victorian costumes from Dutch wax print fabrics, then placing them on headless mannequins that strike leisurely poses. Much like the dandified role that he often assumes, his art seems excessive and frivolous at first glance — high fashion in extremis. But it takes on greater dimensions with consideration. The Dutch wax prints that play a prominent role in Shonibare’s work, for example, are usually associated with Africa, though they were first designed in Indonesia, then imported by the Dutch, who brought them to West Africa during the slave trade, making them a symbol of the height of colonization and imperialism.
The actions of Shonibare’s figures: skating (in 2005’s Reverend On Ice), seducing (in 2007’s The Confession) and swinging, both literally (in 2001’s The Swing — after Fragonard) and figuratively (in 2002’s Gallantry and Criminal Conversation), contain surreal, violent, erotic, and decadent connotations. Like his contemporary Kehinde Wiley, or like Ghostface and Prince in the realm of music, Shonibare uses the rococo movement of pre-revolutionary France as a point of departure. Figures of excess and tools of subversion, his headless mannequins take on references to the guillotine.
"Excess is the only legitimate means of subversion, " Shonibare has said. "Hybridization is a form of disobedience … an excessive form of libido, it is joyful sex." An illustration of such ideas, this monograph retrospective of Shonibare’s painting, sculpture, photography, and film work is a must-have piece of Afro-surreal ephemera.
Shokushu Goukan!
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Readers:
It’s a dull, drippy week in California and when the weather gets like this a writer’s fancy turns to tentacles.
Manifestly untrue, I know, but mine did. Recently while researching something else (the famous Sybian ride-on sex toy, the one whose dealer claims it will "cause a female to literally explode on it" — I hate it when that happens!) I came upon a repository of tentacle porn, and boy did that take me back. Once upon a time I had somehow managed never to hear of tentacle porn until one night when I was hanging out with my friend Annalee Newitz, the high tech high-weirdness expert and she was all, "Oh, blah blah blah this weird thing and that weird thing and tentacles" and I was all, "Wait, what was that last thing again?"
It’s tentacle porn. It’s Japanese. Extremely Japanese. Innocent schoolgirl types, drawn anime/hentai fashion with giant eyes and giant boobs and teensy little bodies clad in teensy little schoolgirl uniforms, until they’re not, get non-consensually multipenetrated by … tentacles. How did you think that sentence was going to end?
Anyway, I got the idea and I stored it away and brought it out occasionally to amuse or shock people and I totally forgot I’d still never seen any myself until I went looking for something else and somehow stumbled over the tentacles (another "I hate it when that happens" thing) and it all came back to me.
It’s the dullest thing ever. I’d seen enough hentai (anime porn) to expect this (it tends to be weirdly slow and standardized and repetitive and badly dubbed). It’s not the easiest sort of porn to project yourself into, even for a person who likes porn more than I do. And that’s the stuff without tentacles. The odd thing about the tentacles, beyond the fact that they exist at all (they were invented to get around restrictions on depictions of non-tentacular intercourse), is that they are so … uninspired. They never seem to be attached to an interesting monster with any motivations besides rape, and they have a very limited repertoire of sexual acts. They’re very "bad teenage date" — stick it in, stick it in, stick it in, but unlike a bad teenage date, they can do all the sticking-in at the same time. Whoopty-do.
Here’s what I do like about tentacle porn:
1) Making fun of it has turned into a sort of online cottage industry, and if you look around you can find some hilarious examples, like the grumpy beasties at Ghastly’s Ghastly Comic: Tentacle Monsters and the Women Who Love Them (www.ghastlycomic.com) who are offended that anyone might think they’d commit an act of "bestiality." See also "How To Avoid Tentacle Rape" (uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/HowTo:Avoid_tentacle_rape) or Dwight Schrute’s blog (www.nbc.com/The_Office/dwights-blog/2008/05/the-curious-rise-of-tentacle-sex-in-manga).
I think Cthulhu might like it, and whatever keeps Cthulhu happy … It has its own soda (www.tentaclegrape.com).
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
I found some very weird porn on my boyfriend’s computer (I swear I wasn’t snooping!) It’s bondage stuff with Japanese girls and really, I don’t know what’s going on. He’s never even mentioned an interest in anything like this! Does he want to tie me up? (Not my thing.) Does he wish I was Japanese? Help!
Love,
Tall, blonde, not tied up
Dear Blondie:
I‘m sorry! I don’t believe you weren’t snooping, mind you, but I’m still sorry. Please don’t take this too much to heart, though. Boys will be boys, and boys will look at bondage porn.
You have two ways to go here. The first is to ask him about it and (probably) feel better when he (probably) insists that he likes you just the way you are, and if he wanted a Japanese bondage girl he would have tried to date them back when he was dating, and he’s sorry he freaked you out. The second is to just shrug and go about your business. I do kind of have a preference for the latter, but I will understand if you can’t let it go and feel like you have to confront.
Just practice telling yourself that fantasy is fantasy and reality is reality and many people harbor fantasies they not only can’t act out, but wouldn’t even want to given the opportunity. Make sure you believe this yourself before you confront him. Otherwise your skepticism is sure to show, and he will get defensive and end up accusing you of not trusting him and going through his stuff — and that is not somewhere you want to be. See why I’d pick the second option, assuming you gave me ultimate power over your decision-making processes?
What? No, I don’t have creepy power fantasies about running your life, but even if I did I wouldn’t tell you about them, and I’d thank you not to go looking for them on my computer.
Love,
Andrea
Don’t forget to read Carnal Nation (carnalnation.com) for more Andrea and other cool stuff.
“transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix”
REVIEW Spam, napalm, and derivative pop songs weren’t quite the only legacy of U.S. military sojourns through Asia — and specifically Korea and Vietnam — as Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ "transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix" exhibit demonstrates. The artists gathered by curators Viet Le and Yong Soon Min are the children of Andy Warhol and Coca-Cola.
Credit goes to the organizers for pointing to the connections between Vietnam and Korea, which are seldom at the foreground stateside: both shared a history of rapid modernization facilitated by U.S. wartime adventures, and Korea benefited economically for their hand in the Vietnam War, as the second largest foreign military and economic presence. Trade in pop culture — film, music, TV, fashion — has evidently continued between the two countries. But despite the presence of a book and zine reading room filled with Korean, Vietnamese, and American transplants’ ballads, bubblegum, rockers, and protest music, this grab bag of an exhibition manifests little of the fizzy wit and energy implied in its title. Instead it assumes a primarily somber, somewhat cryptic tone — more wall text would have helped. This solemn quality is most forthrightly and movingly manifested in Dinh Q. Lê’s video triptych, The Farmers and the Helicopters (2007).
The exceptions make their mélange of pop and politics simultaneously pointed and explicit: examples include Tiffany Chung’s video works, Lam Truong (2007) and the scooter-guys (2007), which juxtapose the frenetic movements of Viet boy bands with bands of working delivery boys; and Min Hwa Choi Chul-Hwan’s 2006 To the Rockers paintings of lost-looking urban youth, paired with Twentieth Century — 1972.6 III (2006), his blown-up deconstruction of AP photographer Nick Ut’s 1972 image of a naked Vietnamese girl burnt by napalm running toward the viewer. Would Warhol have approved? And do any works make as much of a stealth impact as Oh Yongseok’s video montages Drama No. 3 and Drama No. 5 (both 2004-2005)? Cornered by these pieced-together panoramas, which appropriate snippets of Asian films and TV, one is confronted by both the Korean tradition of landscape painting and small, startling moments of violence and disquiet that rupture the stillness at the edges of the frame.
TRANSPOP: KOREA VIETNAM REMIX Through Sun/15. Tues.–Wed., Fri.–Sun., noon–5 p.m.; Thurs., noon–8 p.m. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. $6; $3 seniors, students, and youth; free for members (free first Tues.). (415) 978-ARTS, www.ybca.org
alt.sex.column: Shokushu Goukan!
By Andrea Nemerson. View more alt.sex here.
Dear Readers:
It’s a dull, drippy week in California and when the weather gets like this a writer’s fancy turns to tentacles.
Manifestly untrue, I know, but mine did. Recently while researching something else (the famous Sybian ride-on sex toy, the one whose dealer claims it will "cause a female to literally explode on it" — I hate it when that happens!) I came upon a repository of tentacle porn, and boy did that take me back. Once upon a time I had somehow managed never to hear of tentacle porn until one night when I was hanging out with my friend Annalee Newitz, the high tech high-weirdness expert and she was all, "Oh, blah blah blah this weird thing and that weird thing and tentacles" and I was all, "Wait, what was that last thing again?"
It’s tentacle porn. It’s Japanese. Extremely Japanese. Innocent schoolgirl types, drawn anime/hentai fashion with giant eyes and giant boobs and teensy little bodies clad in teensy little schoolgirl uniforms, until they’re not, get non-consensually multipenetrated by … tentacles. How did you think that sentence was going to end?
Anyway, I got the idea and I stored it away and brought it out occasionally to amuse or shock people and I totally forgot I’d still never seen any myself until I went looking for something else and somehow stumbled over the tentacles (another "I hate it when that happens" thing) and it all came back to me.
It’s the dullest thing ever. I’d seen enough hentai (anime porn) to expect this (it tends to be weirdly slow and standardized and repetitive and badly dubbed). It’s not the easiest sort of porn to project yourself into, even for a person who likes porn more than I do. And that’s the stuff without tentacles. The odd thing about the tentacles, beyond the fact that they exist at all (they were invented to get around restrictions on depictions of non-tentacular intercourse), is that they are so … uninspired. They never seem to be attached to an interesting monster with any motivations besides rape, and they have a very limited repertoire of sexual acts. They’re very "bad teenage date" — stick it in, stick it in, stick it in, but unlike a bad teenage date, they can do all the sticking-in at the same time. Whoopty-do.
Here’s what I do like about tentacle porn:
Street Threads: Look of the Day
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Heather, 20th Street and Valencia
Tell us about your look: “I like to be comfortable and I’ll shop anywhere for clothes.”
Street Threads: Look of the Day
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Jenny, 24th Street and Valencia
Tell us about your look: “I don’t really care about my look. I wear what I like and get most of my clothes at thrift shops.”
Street Threads: Look of the Day
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Jack, 24th St. and Sanchez
Tell us about your look: “I like color. No grays.”
Street Threads: Look of the Day
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Jackie, Elizabeth and Castro
Tell us about your look: “I’m a designer myself and I’m wearing St. John. It’s important to dress to look your best and feel comfortable and also wear clothes that flatter your own body.”
Call for help: SF artist in coma in India
By Molly Freedenberg
My dear friend Hollis Hawthorne, a major force in the San Francisco art and bicycle scene, is in critical condition in India. The 31-year-old dancer, artist, and activist was in a tragic motorcycle accident near Pondicherry last Tuesday, February 24, which left her with severe head injuries and in a coma. As of today, she is at Apollo Hospital in Chennai and still unconscious, though she’s finally breathing on her own. Her prognosis is still unknown.
(For the full dramatic story, including heartbreaking details of how her boyfriend kept her alive for 30 minutes doing CPR, and the freak occurrence that rendered her motorcycle helmet useless, check out the blog www.friendsofhollis.blogspot.com. For updates on her health status, check out www.helpholligethome.blogspot.com. Donations can be collected at both sites.)
Hollis is known in San Francisco as co-founder of the Bay Area Derailleurs , an all-female bicycle dance troupe whose purpose is bike activism and female empowerment; founding member of the Cheese Puffs, a tap-dancing burlesque troupe who’ve performed at Hubba Hubba Revue, BootieSF, and for the Guardian at Maker Faire and the DeYoung Museum; member of Burning Man Organization’s DPW; and as a part of Ron Turner’s Last Gasp operation. Her community of friends, family and collaborators also extends to the Sprockettes in Portland, Oregon; Chicken John; the Yard Dogs Roadshow; Extra Action Marching Band; Cyclecide Bike Rodeo; ArtSF; promoters and owners of 1015 Folsom, the Independent, Rickshaw Stop; Los Angeles performance troupe Lucent Dossier (who starred in a Panic at the Disco video on MTV); and many more art, fashion, and activism groups. She is vibrant, creative, inspiring, and passionate – as are the communities she’s a part of.