SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Victoria, 24th St. and Noe
Tell us about your look: “I work at Five and Diamond, so I love getting clothes from them. Also, anything with a unique touch and warm layers.”
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Michael, 24th St. and Diamond
Tell us about your look: “My wife dresses me. She has a great eye and she even made me this hat.”
SFBG’s Juliette Tang peeps the best eco-friendly products and boutiques. Check out her most recent installment here.
Eco-friendly fashion a wonderful concept we should all get behind, but not so wonderful are the poor quality, high cost, and bad design that too often accompany the eco-friendly clothing on the market. Who wants to wear scratchy hemp cargo pants? What about a lumpy wool sweater with an embroidered peace sign? Eco Citizen fights the stereotypes associated with green clothing – that eco-friendly garments are ugly, uncomfortable, or out of touch with what’s currently in style – by offering beautiful garments with high design value that appeal on both an ecological and aesthetic level.
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Marika, Oakland
Tell us about your look: “My fashion philosophy is eclectic. I like to change it up from day to day, but right now i am really into yellow thrift store sweaters.”
By Steven T. Jones
Polly Superstar and Barron Scott Levkoff met in 1999, shortly after Polly arrived in San Francisco from London, where she was a latex fashion designer involved in the fetish scene. They gravitated toward the same sex-positive community here, which they have tapped or morphed for the Kinky Salon parties they throw at a home they’ve dubbed Mission Control.
“I’ve been involved since 1990 with different costume subcultures in San Francisco,” Scott said. “Like the Costumer’s Society, like Dark Garden, doing fairy tale masquerade balls, doing the Renaissance Faire, getting involved with Burning Man early on.”
Sex has always been central to this open couple’s lifestyle, but the sex at their parties is almost secondary to the parties themselves, where costumes and other forms of creative expression dominate. As they like to say, they aren’t sex parties, but parties where sex and sexual expression happens, usually in the rooms off the dance floor.
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Paige, 23rd St. and Mission
Tell us about your look: “Go with whatever’s tight.”
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Dark Was the Night: A Red Hot Compilation
(4AD)
By Todd Lavoie
Benefit albums have always been a noble but iffy prospect for the music buyer. Unfortunately, too many well-meaning compilations have seen their intentions unfairly matched with either a glaring lack of cohesion or a failure to procure decent songs from the artists involved. More often than not, charity discs tend to come across as sonically and/or thematically disjointed, thanks to the piecemeal fashion with which they’re frequently put together – with each artist contributing without any sort of direction or instructions, the resulting collection runs the risk of ending up a jumbled, unfocused mess and an awkward start-to-finish listen.
Worse yet, many of these benefits seem to be cobbled together with whatever scraps have been previously tossed aside by the artists involved: lesser B-sides, uninspired live tracks, or sonic afterthoughts that never received a full fleshing-out for one reason or another. Considering the labor of love that goes on behind the scenes in assembling such a disc – contacting musicians and agents and record labels to convince them to join the cause, for example – it’s a shame that the end product often fails to project an equivalent amount of passion and fire. Scan the bargain bins at any CD shop, and you’ll see what I mean.
Not so for the Red Hot Organization, however – the culture-savvy international charity has spent the past 20 years fighting AIDS and raising HIV awareness through releasing countless inspired compilations. Unlike many other heart-of-gold organizations, Red Hot tends to do much more than merely compile a bunch of donated tracks to disc.
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Madeliaine, Mission and 19th St.
Tell us about your look: “No comment…”
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
REVIEW Nation, ethnicity, family, friends, gender, lover — where do our true loyalties lie? More to the point, when our multiple loyalties slip out of concentric orbit and collide, how much say do we really have in the matter? These questions arise provocatively from two very different plays making their Bay Area premieres.
In the first, Golden Thread’s generally sturdy West Coast premiere of Joyce Van Dyke’s A Girl’s War: An Armenian-Azeri Love Story, an aging Armenian American fashion model, Anna (Ana Bayat), returns to the war-torn village of her youth determined not to be affected by the ongoing ethnic strife that has just taken the life of her brother (Adrian Cervantes Mejia) and racked the Azerbaijani region of Karabakh since the late 1980s — converting her stolid yet hot-tempered mother (Bella Warda) into a machine gun–toting foot soldier for the Armenian cause. Almost flaunting her own aloofness and disapproval, Anna even resists calling herself Armenian and soon falls in love with a returning member of her family’s onetime Azeri neighbors, now antagonists: a passionate young deserter (Zarif Kabeir Sadiqi) who arrives stealthily one day at her mother’s house, which he and his family briefly occupied years before.
Van Dyke’s 2001 play opens on a world seemingly apart, however, as Brit fashion photographer Stephen (Simon Vance) snaps photos of the still-striking Anna, his old flame and muse, glowering at him in some haute-couture idea of battle garb. The contrast is key and works its way into the second setting in Karabakh, when Stephen and his cheerful but recently shaken assistant Tito (Mejia) arrive after escaping anti-U.S. feelings during a harrowing trip to Turkey. Here in her mother’s house, Anna’s two worlds collide even as she insists she needs no land, passport, or language to define her. Her stoic but long-suffering mother, however, shows little patience for her daughter’s flighty Western cosmopolitanism, and we are left with our own sympathies unsettled, fraternizing with all sides.
Along the way, the play neatly works a certain doubling conceit. The same actor playing the Italian American Tito, for instance, also plays Anna’s recently deceased brother, a spectral presence in the form of the far more severe but equally sensitive Seryozha. The implications are subtle rather than crude, suggesting the dramatic shaping done by circumstance across a universal segment of young manhood. And the climax, in yet another doubling, underscores the point resonantly, as another two seemingly very different characters lie side by side, brought together in death — the most democratic of states — and made mirror images of each other. It’s an effect that might have been overplayed, but under artistic director Torange Yeghiazarian’s confident direction it happily comes off with matter-of-fact simplicity. The play as a whole succeeds in similar fashion, overshadowing, if not altogether escaping, its more maudlin and moralizing tendencies with fitting dramatic tension, unexpected twists, and thematic delicacy.
TO HELL AND BACK Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, meanwhile, offers an admirably complex take on love and loyalty in the context of the proverbial war of the sexes, in director Buddy Butler’s graceful Northern California premiere of William A. Parker’s Waitin’ 2 End Hell. An African American couple (a towering Alex Morris and a slyly understated Pjay Phillips) find their relationship hitting the skids after 20 years of marriage, dividing along lines of gender solidarity the four friends who’ve shown up to celebrate their anniversary. If the title — playing on the Terry McMillan novel — isn’t that funny, Parker’s naturalistic dialogue offers consistent laughs and truths, pivoting expertly on the comic and tragic dimensions of male-female rivalry in the context of African American experience. There is one seeming misstep late in the plot — a slightly hard-to-believe change of heart evoked at gunpoint — but this is a surprisingly powerful and well-rounded comedy about love; the entwined politics of race, class, and gender; and the long haul every family faces.
A GIRL’S WAR
Through March 8
Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.; $15–$25
Thick House
1695 18th St., SF
WAITIN’ 2 END HELL
Through March 1
Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; $24–$36
Lorraine Hansberry Theatre
77 Beale, SF
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Omar, Mission and 19th St.
Tell us about your look: “My style is rocker all the way.”
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Rena, Mission and 19th St.
Tell us about your look: “My style is casual but fun. I got these sunglasses in Brooklyn. I was still in high school and I saved up my allowance for months just to buy them.”
By Diane Sussman
There is a subterranean cache of parking spaces in the city that, if justly liberated, could get hundreds of cars off the streets.
I refer to landlords, many of them absentee bridge-and-tunnelers, who are using garage spaces that rightfully should be reserved for tenants’ cars as free storage units for their personal possessions or as permanent parking spots for their own infrequently used cars.
I personally know of two buildings – one a four-unit building in Potrero Hill and the other a 10-unit building in Alamo Square – whose tenants have been forced to vie for street parking for years because their landlords are otherwise occupying the space.
Even more galling, these same landlords have “no parking” signs posted on these garages, and have no qualms about towing or ticketing when their theoretical “driveways” are blocked. (Note to landlords: In typical shit rolling downhill fashion, these displaced tenants often block the bona fide working garages of people who do use their garages to come and go from work, errands, doctor visits and so on. Their justification: “There was no place to park.”)
It’s time for the city to get hip to this cynical practice and eradicate it. Garages should be for the people who live there — in this case, the tenants (who, let’s not forget, are paying some of the highest rents in the country for their apartments). Here are my ideas for accomplishing this.
1. Establish an anonymous tip line for tenants to report landlords who are using their garages in their buildings as storage units. If a landlord is reported, the DPT (or if there is no existing bureaucracy for this, then someone should invent one) should do an inspection. Landlords in violation should be forced to clean out the garages and offer space to their tenants.
2. Landlords who want the space for their personal use – and who have permission from a kindly car-free tenant – should reimburse the tenant at a rate commensurate with long-term parking fees in the city.
3. Landlords whose garages have no cars moving in and out should be prohibited from towing cars blocking the space. Instead, they should allow their tenants to permanently occupy the space, either by parking in the driveway or parallel to the curb in front the driveway (perfectly legal). If multiple tenants want a shot, the landlord should offer a fair rotation.
Incidentally, the DPT does not allow people with non-working garages to issue citations. “No, not allowed. No,” said a DPT dispatcher. “You must be able to demostrate that you can get your car in and out – we will absolutely make you open that garage door to prove it.”
All I’m saying is, let’s add some spirit to the letter of the law.
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Shaughn, Valencia and 20th St.
Tell us about your look: “I’m from Southern California so I’d say my style is mostly from LA.”
By Laura Peach
This year, our favorite star of the Fashion Week runway happens to be both an international style icon and an old childhood friend: Barbie.
To pay tribute to the famous doll’s golden anniversary, designers such as Tommy Hilfiger, Nicole Miller, Derek Lam, and Nanette Lepore created dreamy doll designs for Barbie’s runway debut.
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Luka, 22nd St. and Bartlett
Tell us about your look: “I’d say my style is all things ripped. I get most of my clothes off the streets of San Francisco.”
By Andre Torrez
I entered SoMa’s Paradise Lounge for the first time this past Valentine’s Day, startled by an unexpected fashion show – it was scheduled, I just didn’t know about it – oddly set to the music of the Jackson 5. And it wasn’t your typical “ABC,” or “I Want You Back.” No, that wouldn’t have fit the atmosphere at all. It was one of their less obvious ’70s grooves, something a little grittier and less innocent, so props to the DJ who demonstrated the intuition to foreshadow an evening of freaks on the floor.
The brief parade of design provided a blur of a background as we settled into the club. With drinks in tow, my friends and I made our way upstairs to get a better view above the stage. Before we knew it, HOTTUB, Oakland’s answer to queercore, was shakin’ its shit all over the place. If memory serves me right, the group has referred to a few of its tracks as real “pussy bangers.” Perhaps that’s a suggestion for what to do while listening to their music. I’m not really sure.
Compiled by Breena Kerr
Midori shares the secrets of dominance at Stormy Leather on Thursday.
>> Amateur Night at the Lusty Lady
Now you can be a Lusty Lady too, just bring your best moves and be ready to bump and grind it with the best of them.
Wed/18, 5pm-9pm, $1
1033 Kearny, SF
415.391.3991
www.lustyladysf.com
————
>> The Art of Feminine Dominance
Master the delicate art of mastering others- “without being a bitch.” Psychology, politics, practical exercises, techniques, fashion and more- rookies to experts are invited to unlock the power-woman within.
Thursday/ 19, 7:30pm, $25 in advance, $30 at the door
Stormy Leather Retail Store
1158 Howard St San Francisco
415.626.1672
www.stormyleather.com
AWARDS SHOW I’m actually pretty jazzed for the 2009 Oscars: there are some exciting nominees, and the broadcast is guaranteed to be less dull with Hugh Jackman (the first-ever adamantium-enhanced host!) guiding the proceedings. But before Feb. 22’s awkward montage of dead Academy members (farewell, Paul Newman!), stiffly scripted banter ‘twixt presenters, and inevitable fashion faux pas, it’s important to pick your favorite and least favorite nominees. You gotta know whom to cheer (and jeer) once you have a bottle (or two) of champagne in your system. My opinions on the big races below.
Best Picture I hated The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Mediocre The Reader is taking up what should have been The Dark Knight‘s nomination. Frost/Nixon was great, but mostly for Frank Langella’s performance. To the likely winner: Slumdog Millionaire, I’m just not that into you. If there is any justice, it’ll be a Milk victory — or a write-in campaign will give The Wrestler its due.
Best Director All who helmed Best Pic nominees are represented here (sorry, Darren Aronofsky). Normally I love David Fincher, but Benjamin Button has soured my good thoughts of 1995’s Seven, 1999’s Fight Club, and 2007’s Zodiac (which was an awesome, unfairly overlooked movie). Danny Boyle will probably take it for the crowd-pleasing Slumdog, but I gotta go with Milk‘s Gus Van Sant. You’re the man now, Gus!
Best Actor Richard Jenkins had quite a 2008. I know he’s tipped here for The Visitor, but he was also aces in Burn After Reading and, uh, Step Brothers. He won’t win, though, and neither will Langella for his trickiest of Dick Nixons. For me, it’s a two-man race: Sean Penn for Milk and Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler. Very different performances, but both worthy of Oscars. I have no idea what Brad Pitt is doing here, but the teaser trailer for Inglourious Basterds has made me almost forgive him for aging in reverse.
Best Actress I didn’t really dig The Reader, but goddamn it! They gotta give this to Kate Winslet (who should’ve been nominated for Revolutionary Road instead). Meryl Streep and Angelina Jolie already have Oscars, and Anne Hathaway just starred in Bride Wars. The fantastic Melissa Leo wins just by being nominated — unless she pulls off one of those crazy, Adrien Brody-style upsets that Oscar kicks down once in awhile.
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Katie, Mission and 24th
Tell us about your look: “I get most of my clothes at vintage thrift shops. At the moment I’m obsessed with 80s LA style, the Goth look coming out of Spain, and anything resembling Siouxsie and The Banshees.
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Jaquayla, Church and 17th St.
Tell us about your look: “I’m in fashion school at the moment, and I’ve been sewing since the 6th grade. I love making my own clothes and I also make outfits for my kids.”
SFBG’s Laura Peach checks out local fashion you can afford. Check out her latest installment here.
A tear for the purses of our futures, and a smile for our slimming wallets: San Francisco’s own luxury bag company, Goldenbleu, is dissolving. They are having a huge going out-of-business sale at the Mission Street warehouse tonight, tomorrow and Saturday. Get down to get the very last Goldenbleu goods—sexy strappy sandals, clever double-fold clutches, hot heels and of course those lovely large hold-everything bags—ever to be produced.
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Evelyn, Mission and 25th St.
Tell us about your look: “I’ll wear anything as long as it’s black.”
Justin Juul takes on singular porn hottie Buck Angel in part one of this exclusive SEX SF interview.
Buck Angel is a dude who makes a living having sex with other dudes in movies with names like “Buckback Mountain,” “Pig Ass,” and “The Buck Stops Here.” He has huge muscles and tattoos, smokes expensive cigars, and lives in Mexico where people don’t give a shit about anything. But that’s not what makes this dude so cool. Buck Angel is exceptional because he has a pussy instead of a dick.
Buck Angel started his entertainment career way back in ‘80s as a super skinny, super hot, fashion model named Susan. Seriously, he was so hot even Howard Stern wishes he could go back and “do him” (although the feeling isn’t mutual). Modeling was great for a while, but Susan knew she’d never be happy as a woman. So she became a Buck instead.
The Guardian recently sat down with Angel to find out what happens when chicks stop being chicks and start being dudes with vaginas who fuck other dudes for money and fame (or something like that).
Part One: On Being A Man With a Pussy
SFBG: Hey Buck, before we get started, I just want to get one thing straight: you’re a transsexual, right? I admit I’m not too familiar with guys who used to be girls. What do you call yourself?
Buck Angel: Ok, well, I’m obviously not a very politically correct person so this might sound weird, but here’s the deal: a transsexual is someone who changes his or her sex so obviously, I am a transsexual. I’ll always be a transsexual, but I don’t live my life that way. When I think about transsexuals, I think about people who are in the process of going through a sex change. That’s not me. I’m finished with my sex change and I’m a man!
SFBG: So you’re just, like, a dude?
Angel: Exactly.
SFBG: What about your pussy?
Angel: I’m a man with a pussy, dude. It is what it is.
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Mauricio, Valencia and 21st St.
Tell us about your look: “No comment … “
