Film Archives — Page 114 of 168 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

My country, my country

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September 30, 2009

FILM We go to documentaries to learn about the lives of others, but rarely are we put in touch with the patience, sensitivity, and grit required of listening. Heddy Honigmann’s films privilege the social aspect of these encounters and are the emotionally richer for it — I’d bet her hard-earned humanism would appeal to a wide cross-section of audiences if given the chance, but her documentaries remain woefully under-distributed. Oblivion is her first set in Lima since 1992’s Metal and Melancholy, still my favorite film of hers. Honigmann, who was born in Lima to Holocaust survivors but left the city to study and work in Europe, made that first film to clarify the everyday reality of Peru’s economic ruin. Instead of submitting a top-down exposition of the situation, she interviews taxi drivers. This was an ingenious maneuver for at least two reasons: it admits the contingencies of her inquiry and floats a matter-of-fact portrait of the people’s despair on the motor-mouthed musings of actual people. Their informal testimonies are too flush with colloquial wisecracking, cynical tirades, idiosyncratic performances, amateur ingenuity, and tender confessions to qualify for pity.

In Oblivion, Honigmann reverses angle, following children and adolescents as they flip cartwheels for stopped traffic, the crosswalk their stage. She also zeroes in on the more established service class, from a stunned shoeshine boy up to a dexterous master of the pisco sour. Slowly, we realize Honigmann’s interviews are an exercise in political geography: she talks to people in the near proximity of the presidential palace, the long shadow of Peru’s ignominious political history framing their discreet stories. Oblivion exhibits both class consciousness and formal virtuosity in its coterminous realizations of an Altman-numbered array of characters. As ever, Honigmann’s ability to transform the normally airless interview format into a cohesive band of intimate encounters is simply stunning. History consigned them to oblivion, but as Honigmann adroitly shows by periodic cut-aways to past presidential inaugurations, personal memory often outlasts the official record.

OBLIVION opens Fri/2 at the Sundance Kabuki.

No resolve

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September 30, 2009

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arts@sfbg.com

FILM It was the last Bush administration’s master PR stroke to render terrorism completely abstract while appearing to frame it in layman’s terms. There’s no real choosing sides when the choices are "evil" and "freedom" — who’s going to say slow down there, pardner, when the cause is painted as humanity against the inhuman? That equation bought carte blanche approval for a lot of dumb subsequent moves, with the world arguably no safer as a consequence.

Most Americans have an absolute faith that we’re the good guys. But most bad guys were good guys once — it’s a process, not a natal condition. It’s unpleasant but valuable work to imagine exactly how fanaticism can create a sense of righteousness in violence, as opposed to the zero brain power required to think an entire country or religion might wake up one day and say "Let’s be evildoers!"

We’d like to think our principles would withstand hunger, torture, propaganda, Rolfing, whatever. But who really knows what we’re be capable of after a few weeks, months, years of deprivation or indoctrination? It took Patty Hearst just 71 days to become machine-gun-wielding Tania. Who can blame her if she chose a life of John Waters cameos and never discussed the matter afterward? The woman who robbed a Hibernia Bank must seem like a stranger — the kind who nonetheless can shame you by association, like an embarrassing relative or something said while very drunk. Her personality was bent against her will. Luckily, it sprang back.

The character played by Liam Neeson in Five Minutes of Heaven deals with his terroristic youth in precisely the opposite fashion — it’s become both penitentiary cause and ruination of his life. Neeson is an actor who carries his looks and towering stature like a burden — few stars are so at home communicating guilt, masochism, and rueful sacrifice. His Alistair is an esteemed present-day lecturer, activist, and conflict-resolution mediator of violent group behavior.

His qualifying original sin: in 1974, at age 17, he assassinated a young Catholic local to prove mettle within a midsize Irish city’s pro-England, Protestant guerrilla sect. He served 12 years for that crime. But Neeson’s face knows Alistair’s punishment is neverending. In mind’s eye he keeps seeing his young self (Mark Davison) committing murder — as witnessed by the victim’s little brother, Joe (Kevin O’Neill).

Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, German director of 2004’s Downfall, Five Minutes of Heaven — the ecstatic timespan James Nesbitt’s flop-sweating adult Joe figures he’d experience upon killing Alistair — is divided into three acts. The first is a vivid, gritty flashback. The second finds our anxious protagonists preparing for a "reconciliation" TV show taping that doesn’t go as planned. Finally the two men face each other in an off-camera meeting that vents Joe’s pent-up lifetime of rage.

Heaven has been labeled too theatrical, with its emphasis on two actors and a great deal of dialogue. But the actors are fantastic, the dialogue searing. There’s nothing stagy in the skillful way both rivet attention. This very good movie asks a very human question: how do you live with yourself after experiencing the harm fanaticism can wreak, as perp or surviving victim? Surely we’re better off for understanding what shapes terrorism. The alternative is psychological non-insight as blunt as the concept "evildoer."

FIVE MINUTES OF HEAVEN opens Fri/2 in Bay Area theaters.

Lame “Anatomy”

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September 28, 2009

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By D. Scot Miller

ANATOMY OF AN ADULT FILM
Sunset Thomas and R. Richard
(World Audience Inc.)

Finally! A book I can trash! I can’t tell you how long I’ve waited for something so bad to fall into my grimy little hands. Deep down inside, all critics are sadists. Everyone knows it. Everyone loves it. But it’s rare to find a work that is so masochistic in its conception that it is the equivalent to the animal kingdom’s definition of “presenting.”

Well, Thomas and her ghosty cowriter “R” present big-time with Anatomy An Adult Film and I, for one, am thrilled! As I salivate over this, rubbing my hands together like the best cartoon villain, I wonder where to begin. It’s all just so tempting!

Let’s begin with the writing. Oh god, it’s so bad! If Thomas has any eloquence in her speech, “R” is quick to squelch it with the fervor of a fan-boy whose read too many “Penthouse Confessions.”

Dewy decibels: Asthmatic Kitty’s ‘Library Catalog Music’

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September 25, 2009

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as kit library catalog 092509 sm.jpg

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Library Catalog Music, Volumes 1-3
(Asthmatic Kitty)

By Kimberly Chun

Remember the to-do concerning the Shins’ “New Slang” on a McDonald’s commercial? Those days of outrage seem so far away now, in the throes of the continuing recession and ever-deepening music-biz woes. Licensing your sonic slang out to TV, film, and commercial endeavors has become a way of life — and a genuine ticket to recognition for many: Chairlift, whose “Bruises” popped up on an iPod commercial, is just the latest beneficiary of that success narrative.

So perhaps one of the oddest little musical artifacts to emerge amid those fading cries of “sell-out!” is this three-part series produced by Asthmatic Kitty. Library Catalog Music looks the phenom squarely in the eye, as its promo literature queries, “Are you a major multi-national corporate conglomerate looking for quickly recognizable audio branding?” I wish. Actually, I don’t wish. But like so many others, I can use the cash, and apparently Asthmatic Kitty can, too — though not without a certain level of integrity. These overt entries into the marketplace wouldn’t be too out of place among some of your more enticing Euro-ambient discs. Vol. 1, Music for Lubbock, 1980, dares to tug on the tails of Ry Cooder’s Paris, Texas, while Vol. 2, Music for Measurements, brings the funk to imagined buddy cop flicks, and Vol. 3’s Music for Drums yearns to set the beat to sci-fi fantasies. Who dreamed these ready-made scores up? Bellevue, Wash., band Law of the Least Effort takes the credit — led by sometime Pedro the Lion and Seldom member Casey Foubert. Quality aural wallpaper — coming right up.

Black gold? Oil doc “Crude” opens today

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September 25, 2009

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By Laura Swanbeck

If the Amazon is the “lungs of the world,” the exhausted natural resources and indigenous people who have lived there for centuries are in need of some serious oxygen. Crude, a candid, even-keeled documentary by Joe Berlinger (1996’s Paradise Lost; 2004’s Metallica: Some Kind of Monster) examines the class-action lawsuit filed by 30,000 Ecuadorians who charge that Chevron, who bought out Texaco in 2001, is responsible for dumping 18 billion gallons of toxinogens into the Amazon between 1972 to 1990. However, the oil conglomerate counters that state-owned PetroEcuador, which has since taken over, truly ravaged the countryside, polluted streams, and killed off inhabitants and livestock. Although the film’s opening — in which the lead prosecutor, Pablo Fajardo, accepts the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in San Francisco — suggests closure, Berlinger realizes that this battle is far more complicated than your average David vs. Goliath story. A study in perseverance and public perception (Trudie Styler and Sting make cameos to drum up support), Crude delves into political strategy, American entitlement (on both sides), and the frustrating bureaucracy that has plagued this ongoing case.

Crude opens today at the Lumiere and Shattuck.

Kinky talk: Midori on how to eat a peach, more

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September 24, 2009

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Interview by Juliette Tang

Midori, photographed by Constance Smith. See more hot local women of BDSM in our “Submission Possible!” cover story this week.

Sex educator, artist, writer, and diva, Midori, is currently showing her latest installation, Plastics, at Femina Potens (2199 Market St). I stopped by Femina Potens to chat with Midori as she was setting up and was faced with a turbulent sea of blow-up dolls, plastic breasts, knives, razor blades, and syringes. We quickly relocated to the more conventional setting of a cafe down the street, where we had a nice chat about avocados and what it means to be kinky, over coffee cake and Earl Gray.

SFBG: So, what kind of classes do you teach?
Midori: With 60 to 70 different topics, I have a wide range to go from general sexuality to the sexual subcultures of Japan to kinkier topics.

SFBG: What are you working on right now?
M: I have a couple of books I’m way behind on that I need to get done. One’s about how to eat a peach, and it’s really funny and a lot of fun.

SFBG: How to eat a peach? Can you elaborate?
M: So we have this idea that if you can tie a cherry stem into a knot, that means you’re good at oral sex. Tying the cherry is not that practical when it comes to our clits. You’re not going to take the clit and tie it into a knot. But if a tongue can do a nice, deep thrust and a curl-in, and do that for like, 5 sets of 10: that’s practical. You know, I’ve got a shortish, average tongue. It’s not necessarily the equivalent of size. It’s how you move it.

From “Silken Sleeves,” a short film by Maria Beatty featuring Midori

SFBG: There’s a lot of food imagery in that description.
M: One’s attitude to sex and life is like one’s attitude to food. Food is something you need. However, you can overindulge. You can have a very strange relationship with it. You can have an abusive relationship with it. You can have a market manipulated, media manipulated relationship with food. You can cook it and consume it carelessly, or you can consume it mindfully. You can end up sharing food with a stranger or with someone you absolutely love head-over-heels. Food and sex… the attitude is very similar.

SFBG: Can you give us a food recipe you find particularly sexy?
M: So imagine you’ve been out all day, on your feet. It’s hot and all that, and you come home and your sweetie has one of those beautiful shallow Chinese goldfish ceramics, with pebbles in it. So, hot day you’re tired, your feet are swollen. And you have cool water, pebbles, mint leaves, and citrus slices, and your sweetie takes brown sugar and scrubs your feet.

Skin flicks: 2009 IXFF wrap-up!

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September 23, 2009

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By Louis Peitzman

Paul Festa grooms in Let Me Tell You John Cameron Mitchell.

The Good Vibrations Independent Erotic Film Festival finally went down (tee-hee!) last week. September 17’s competition at the Castro Theatre brought out the best, brightest, and naked-est in a series of shorts that will hopefully help to redefine the future of the genre. For those of us tired of the overproduced crap that usually passes for pornography, the screening was a breath of kinky fresh air.

It helped that the event was hosted by four lovely ladies: Good Vibes sexologist and chief cultural officer Dr. Carol Queen, Peaches Christ, Lady Bear, and Hugz Bunny. Sitting on a couch in front of the stage, they commented on the films with wit, insight, and just the slightest bit of sass. Stressful for the filmmakers, I’m sure — who wants to have their erection judged by a drag queen? — but entertaining for the rest of us.

There were 11 films screened, and rather than dissect them all (because that would be bo-ring), allow me to highlight my four faves.

Let Me Tell You John Cameron Mitchell (Paul Festa)
Festa’s short film is actually an edited version of an audition tape he submitted for John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus (2006). Despite its origins, it works well as a stand-alone. And yes, I’m probably biased by a slight crush on the director and star, but this is legitimately successful work. What I like most about Let Me Tell You is the way it sexualizes the mundane — who knew shaving one’s head could be so erotic?

Narcissister, with hot lunch

Narcissister’s Hot Lunch (Narcissister)
I’m going to be honest: I’m actually a little creeped out by Narcissister. For those not familiar with her work, it involves a half-mask and other fake body parts. (Well, I think they’re fake. If real nipples could produce ketchup, I’d be pretty impressed.) Still, there is something hypnotizing about her dance moves and the comedy she works into the finished product. Bonus points for her use of “Hot Lunch” from Fame (1980) here.

Northen high (and low) lights

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September 23, 2009

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>>Check out Jesse Hawthorne Ficks’ TIFF takes here.

FILM FESTIVAL REPORT There weren’t exactly tumbleweeds rolling through Park City, but this January’s Sundance Film Festival did have a becalmed feeling reflecting the economic panic — money, corporate sponsors, and industry personnel weren’t falling from the sky quite so thickly as usual, which naturally made the experience that much more pleasant for those simply there to see movies. There was no such diminished frenzy apparent at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 10-19), even if one of the local papers lamented "parties are smaller and over early." (Cue the Bee Gees’ "Tragedy.")

There’d been more serious lamentation in recent years that TIFF has gone too Hollywood, too average-viewer-unfriendly, its programming now driven by (rather than simply attracting) celebrity and media attention. That’s clearly not true of the program’s bulk. Still, you’ve got to wonder just how the "art" of cinema is being celebrated when one big-noise 2009 premiere was no less (what could be less?) than Jennifer’s Body, which put Diablo Cody’s Oscar in perspective.

Not much more defensible were a slew of hollow costume flicks, from opening night’s kinda-’bout-Darwin Creation to the closing Young Victoria, with Oliver Parker’s latest Wildean crapfest Dorian Gray, Carlos Saura’s frivolous I, Don Giovanni, and Stephen Poliakoff’s silly Glorious 39 among the plush time-killers unveiled like papier-mâché statuary between.

Those are movies likely to underwhelm soon at a theatre near you — though not so soon as the enthusiastically received latest efforts by the Coen brothers, Terry Gilliam, Michael Haneke, Jason Reitman, Michael Moore, Steven Soderbergh, Jane Campion, Pedro Almodóvar, Todd Solondz, and others no doubt already ramping up their Oscar campaigns. Those were easy to put off. But there was a great deal I was very sorry to miss, like Cornieliu Porumboiu’s Romanian Police, Adjective, Raoul Peck’s Haitian Moloch Tropical, and Shirin Neshat’s Tehran period piece Women Without Men, films whose chances of U.S. distribution are variably remote.

Among titles caught, low expectations were more often met with high rewards than vice versa. Das Boot (1981) in a tank, Venice Film Festival Golden Lion winner Lebanon proved an effective but unremarkable war-is-hell statement. There was controversy over Tel Aviv’s spotlight in the inaugural "City to City" sidebar. But if government propagandist efforts secured that slot as charged, other Israeli features here, like Danny Lerner’s lurid Kirot, were hardly goodwill ambassadors.

On the other hand, Lars von Trier’s Cannes scandal Antichrist turned out neither brilliantly here nor appallingly there — though one viewer did upchuck at a press screening, and a publicist called mine the first neutral reaction she’d heard of.

Elsewhere, the flowers of evil bloomed in myriad hothouse forms, some rather wilted on arrival. Perhaps most intriguing was a portrait of a movie that will never fully exist: L’Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot reconstructs footage from an aborted early ’60s thriller by the French genre master. Experimenting with psychedelic imagery to evoke pathological jealousy, he abandoned ship midway, but the remains still fascinate. Another mental health vacation, Werner Herzog’s improbable Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, won numerous fans. Yet it’s much less fraught with danger than Abel Ferrera’s 1992 original, and for all its gratuitous goofing too often looks/sounds like direct-to-cable product.

Plumbing sillier darknesses were the lamentable latests by George Romero (Survival of the Dead) and Joe Dante (The Hole), not to mention yet more not-different-enough vampire stuff (Suck, Daybreakers), a middling Manson recap (Leslie, My Name is Evil), and one dullish Robert E. Howard adventure (Solomon Kane). Midnight Madness’ one shining light was a nasty little Australian number, The Loved Ones, after which you will never hear Kasey Chambers’ "Not Pretty Enough" without cringing. I mean, even more than previously.

Elsewhere, pleasures were scattered and unpredictable, with some uneven films elevated by performances — Woody Harrelson’s delusional superhero in Defendor, Edward Norton as twins in Leaves of Grass, and just about everybody in Rebecca Miller’s The Private Lives of Pippa Lee. Major attention went to Drew Barrymore’s directorial bow Whip It, but Samantha Morton’s own, comparatively overlooked debut The Unloved ranks almost up there with the medium’s greatest horrible-childhood portraits. For originality, nothing quite trumped Corey Adams and Alex Craig’s surreal skateboarder fantasia Machotaildrop, even if its charms eventually wore a bit thin. Which was not an issue for French stop-motion animation A Town Called Panic, 75 minutes of perfect silliness that provided a Gallic heaven to complement Clouzot’s hell.

Come of age

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September 23, 2009

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

FILM A bittersweet tone in movies is an easy thing to flub. The most common culprits are asinine sentimentalism and mock-solemnity, neither of which figures into the graceful cinema of Ermanno Olmi. His early films, Il Posto (1961) and I Fidanzati (1963), still exhibit an impossibly light touch, with a warm humanist core of glances, material texture, and yearning wrapped in a dispassionate view of industrialized alienation.

In Il Posto, a boy’s coming-of-age is rendered a split decision: his entrance into the Milanese workplace is a gloomy premonition of adulthood, but there’s a taste of love for succor. Olmi’s breakthrough would have seemed small even if it hadn’t come on the heels of L’Avventura (1960) and La Dolce Vita (1960). It’s easy to imagine that Il Posto‘s quotidian pleasures might have seemed retrogressive in this context—but with contests for neorealism’s soul laid to rest, it’s easy to appreciate Olmi’s remarkable skill directing amateur actors, his elegant sequencing, and his aching cinematography, as ravishingly revealing as Robert Frank’s contemporaneous photographs. Insofar as the world-weariness of The Exiles (1961) and Killer of Sheep (1977) relate to the Italian style, they travel the Olmi path.

The director has been drawn to simple characters and stories throughout his career, but his own formal means can be surprisingly experimental. In the prolonged opening of I Fidanzati, for instance, Olmi fragments two estranged lovers’ circumnavigation of a dance, stitching together the story of a relationship with a series of elusive encounters plucked from time. The jag echoes Alain Resnais’ early films, but a bookending montage of the lovers reading each other’s letters uses the same technique against the modernist grain, for emotional warmth.

While Olmi’s more highly esteemed cousin in pictorial ennui, Michelangelo Antonioni, absconded with neorealism to the metaphysical realm, Olmi plunged back to earth. To wit: his new film, Terra Madre, is the official documentary of the 2006 Slow Food conference in Turin. A strange hybrid of educational film and poetic reverie, Terra Madre leaves polemics to the conference participants. Olmi’s presence is felt in the digressive close-ups of soil, plants, faces and hands. In a beguiling sequence midway through the film, his camera studies the ramshackle space left behind by a self-sufficient hermit. Does the director see himself in the story of this man who found the world in a small plot of life and tended his own garden for decades? Regardless, the "Life’s Work" retrospective at the PFA is an abundant harvest.

LIFE’S WORK: THE CINEMA OF ERMANNO OLMI

Sept. 25–Oct. 30, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Welcome weirdness

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September 23, 2009

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DNA science has taught us everyone is unique. Art teaches that everyone — even wildly derivative sons-of-bitches — are kinda sorta likewise (at least technically). Still, there’s ordinary "individuality," actual distinctiveness, and then there’s whoa. Belonging to this last category is Swedish writer-director Roy Andersson, who’s made four features in four decades and surely won’t be hurrying up anytime soon.

Does it really take him that long? (Yes: he’s directed hundreds of commercials over the same period, yet took the perceived failure of 1975’s Giliap hard enough to pause a quarter-century before making another movie.) Or is it simply that the unclassifiable gimcracks he now records on film take years to create, not unlike someone’s backyard Lego-built Disneyland or Popsicle-stick Florentine Duomo?

No matter. Andersson’s films are like nothing else in the medium, if anything landing closer to multimedia maxi-minimalist stage avant-gardism like Robert Wilson’s vintage stage spectaculars. Albeit with considerably more humor and warmth, like Meredith Monk’s work both live and cinematic (1988’s Book of Days). But funnier still — like Buster Keaton without the character focus — and cinematically master-diagrammed à la Jacques Tati. Plus droll yet existentially dour in a particularly Scandinavian way.

Which is a long way of explaining You, the Living — finally here for a short theatrical run two years after its Cannes debut — as a bewildering whatsit of immeasurable invention and delight. (Arguably more-awesome Songs from the Second Floor, from 2000, took even longer before it got one week at the Roxie.)

How can one describe You, the Living? Fifty stationary-camera scenes, preceded by a Goethe quote, arrange mostly nonprofessional actors in tableaux of increasing musicality heavy on Dixieland tuba. Characters and settings do occasionally recur, but there’s very little "plot" per se. The highly worked production design (almost entirely studio-bound) is all queasy pastels, with a particular fondness for ’70s grandma-sweater-yarn lime.

There is, however, a slyly escautf8g absurdity in which Nordic miserabilism and fantasy apocalypticism somehow jigger a perfect cocktail. The taste is odd, at first — then it knocks you pleasurably sideways. There’s no easy convincing till you’ve seen it. Then there’s no easy convincing anyone else until you’ve made them see it. That’s worth the effort, though, because they will be so glad, and astonished by your rarefied good taste. (Dennis Harvey)

YOU, THE LIVING opens Fri/25 at the Sundance Kabuki.

Creamin’ for comics

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September 23, 2009

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culture@sfbg.com

Erotic comics are a special breed of porn. Unlike prose, they can show as well as describe. Unlike photos, they’re narrative. Unlike film, they have a limitless special effects budget. Comics are capable of everything from gritty, realistic detail to "yowza!" flights of fancy — perfect for the demands of erotica.

And yet good erotic comics seem in short supply. Despite a venerable history that stretches from the Tijuana Bibles of the 1920s to the wild antics of the underground comix movement in the ’60s and ’70s, porn comics have languished of late. Alternative and independent comics have been trending more toward asexuality. And gay male erotic cartoonists are only now struggling out of the shadow of Tom of Finland, whose comics of square-jawed, fascist-reminiscent leathermen and bikers have dominated gay erotic art in the same way that Tolkien’s imagination bound and gagged fantasy writers for generations.

Once you start digging, however, it’s remarkable the gems you can find. The fact that comics are so marginalized creates a kind of purity to the art form. Cartoonists aren’t motivated by fame and fortune, but rather by their passion for their stories and their art. The same is doubly true for erotic cartoonists, whose work is often an evolution of the naughty pictures they drew compulsively while growing up.

Here are a few of the most unusual, hot, and fun recent erotic comics collections to get your juices flowing.

BEST EROTIC COMICS 2009

Greta Christina, Editor

(Last Gasp)

www.lastgasp.com

A man stimulates the orifice of a bound mermaid with a twig, an infertile professor convinces a student to impregnate his wife, a dominatrix hires a gay masseur to fuck her boyfriend, a sadistic dom pisses all over her girlfriend, King Kong and Godzilla have hot sex in the ruins of Tokyo.

Best Erotic Comics, an annual collection of the best and brightest of kinky comics, is yet another reason to be proud of our sexy Bay Area, published as it is by legendary, local institution Last Gasp. Editor Greta Christina has assembled an impressive collection of literary smut comics that run the full gamut of sexual interests, from octopus sex to airplane sex. It’s especially refreshing to see straight porn side by side with gay and lesbian imagery — it allows the reader to understand sexuality as a spectrum of possibilities, and to see how hot the fantasies of others can be.

PRIDE

Gengoroh Tagame

(G-Project, 2007)

www.tagame.org

Odd as it may seem, the best bear comics porn in the world is coming out of Japan, a country with a noticeable lack of big, hairy men. Clearly the exotic has its erotic charms. Unlike yaoi — the popular manga genre in which female cartoonists create stories of gay male romance and sex for an audience of girls and women — bara is gay manga created by actual gay male creators and usually does not feature the yaoi breed of androgynous boys with big eyes and floppy hairdos, but rather burly, hypermasculine men.

No one is better at portraying these than Gengoroh Tagame, arguably the world’s greatest, living erotic cartoonist. His universe is populated with the hottest muscle bears outside of the Lone Star’s patio during Folsom Street Fair weekend, and they have a tendency to be tied up, humiliated, and fucked senseless. Pride is a recent trilogy of books from the master, detailing the gradual transformation of a cocky, hirsute hunk into an obedient slave by a buff, bearded professor. The books are full of all sorts of S-M shenanigans, with our hero being put through the paces, from extreme bondage and piercings to fistings and scat play. Tagame has yet to be translated into English, but he’s such an accomplished cartoonist that his work can still be thoroughly enjoyed.

SMALL FAVORS

Colleen Coover

(Eros Comix, 2002)

www.eroscomix.com

While lesbian imagery exists in various straight publications, there is an unfortunate dearth of true lesbian erotic comics. Colleen Coover’s Small Favors is a notable exception. Coover is an excellent cartoonist and clearly has a great time illustrating her two heroines, Annie and Nibbil, having wild, fun, and juicy sex.

Annie is accused of masturbating too much by her own conscience and is assigned a finger-tall guardian to stop her from getting jiggy with it too often. Fortunately, this tiny watcher winds up being a nympho herself, and jumps Annie at her first opportunity, leading to comics’ best introduction line ever: "Ummm … Hi, Annie! My name’s Nibbil! Gosh, I hope you don’t mind me fucking myself on your nipple!"

WANKY COMICS

BiL Sherman

(Self-published)

www.wankycomics.com

Occasionally you’ll stumble across some underground, barely-distributed mini-comic, put together by the creator with a photocopier and a stapler, that will take your breath away. BiL Sherman’s Wanky Comics is bizarrely brilliant, completely original, and about as underground as you can get.

While the subject matter of the stories in WC ranges wildly from horny unicorns and space-age sex clones to an inexplicably naked superhero and his quest for love, Sherman has a distinctive style that unifies the series. He draws like a thirteen-year-old with OCD and a hard-on, filling his pages with burly, hairy men. Each chest hair is lovingly and obsessively drawn, and the faces are rugged and expressive.

Sherman is unafraid to get both funny and surreal, a refreshing trait in porn comics. The "Mike Thorn and the Nine Satanic Statements," episode, for example, is a blow-by-blow illustration of a scene on a porn set, while the text underneath the images is taken directly from Anton Levey’s Satanic Bible, creating a strangely disconnected, campy, yet beautiful juxtaposition.

BIRDLAND

Gilbert Hernandez

(Eros Comix, 1992)

www.eroscomix.com

Hernandez is one of the creators, along with brothers Jaime and Mario, of Love and Rockets, arguably the single greatest American comic book. Rarely does such a world-class, literary cartoonist turn his talents to porn. Luckily, however, the highly prolific Hernandez created Birdland, a voyeuristic foray into the lives of strippers, bodybuilders, and horny aliens — and one of the classics of erotic comics.

Birdland introduces characters such as Fritz, the large-breasted, brainy psychiatrist with a lisp and a passion for guns, which Hernandez later incorporated into L&R. But while L&R certainly never shies away from sexual material, Birdland is unabashedly erotica, with copious cum shots filling the pages.

Though Hernandez identifies as straight, Birdland is in many ways pansexual erotica, with every type of coupling depicted. The final scene, in which the characters have a giant orgy in a spaceship, is one of the most oddly liberating and transcendent sex sequences ever conceived. After reading it, anything seems possible.

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A GUIDE TO PORN CARTOONISTS AT THIS YEAR’S FOLSOM STREET FAIR

The Folsom Street Fair on Sun/27 is all about community, and one of the ways it demonstrates this is by donating a block of booth space to queer erotic artists, many cartoonists. This year’s little section of the Fair, at 11th Street and Folsom, is very exciting. Here’s some highlights.

Chuck Connor and Sean Platter: the duo’s Demonic Sex series pulls no punches with its depictions of satanic transformations and sexual hells. www.triplesixcomics.com

Dave Davenport and Justin Hall: An accomplished tattoo artist, Davenport uses his illustration chops to create horny werewolves, skate punk ghosts, and other wholesome characters in Hard To Swallow, co-created with Justin Hall (that’s me!). www.hardtoswallowcomics.com

Steve MacIsaac: As the co-creator (along with Dale Lazarov) of Sticky, MacIsaac offers sex-positive stories instead of the rape fantasies that often dominate gay porn. www.stevemacisaac.com

Bradley Rader: Harry and Dickless Tom is the story of two homophobic truckers who screw and then beat up fags. It turns surreal when one wakes up with a vagina. www.flamingartist.com

Sean Z: Sean’s Myth is a superb fantasy comic with complex plots, gorgeous color work, and big-dicked vampires. www.sean-z.com

See www.folsomstreetfair.org/art for more kinky artists.

Of human bondage

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September 23, 2009

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culture@sfbg.com

Swingin’ with a star: Madison Young, photographed by Pat Mazzera

San Francisco is America’s capital of kink. Consider Sunday’s Folsom Street Fair (www.folomstreetfair.org) as a flagship holiday and the Armory, occupied by Kink.com, as a kind of sexual City Hall, and there’s little dispute.

But it may seem peculiar for a city so committed to gender and sexual equality to be the patron city of BDSM: a complicated acronym that stands for bondage and discipline (BD), domination and submission (D/s), sadism and masochism (SM). In crude terms, BDSM relationships are marked by deliberate and sometimes extreme inequality, where a submissive party voluntarily forfeits partial or complete physical, psychological, and emotional control to a dominant one. Although "switching" does occur, D/s — the Dominant (capital D) and submissive power dichotomy — may seem to be everything our traditional concept of liberal empowerment and classical feminism rail against.

But while it might be difficult for some to grasp, BDSM — which includes a broad spectrum of sexual acts including (but not limited to) bondage, corporal punishment, electrostimulation, piercing, branding, suspension, golden showers, and asphyxiation, as well as general play relationships like age play, pet play, medical play, and cross-dressing — is controlled by a strict code of behavior referred to as "SSC," or "safe, sane, and consensual." San Francisco even has its own BDSM nonprofit, the Society of Janus, which was founded in 1974 to promote safe adult power exchange.

Ropes aficionado Fivestar, photographed by Pat Mazzera

And unlike that other U.S. capital, Washington, D.C., where women are systemically outnumbered in the decision-making process, in San Francisco’s kinky community, strong and sexually empowered women are well represented — if not always well understood.

Women in BDSM, unfair as it seems, often receive some of the harshest criticism from a varied opposition. D/s women frequently find their lifestyles attacked by religious groups, academics, psychologists, and sexual conservatives, as well as much of the midsection of the United States. Whether stigmatized as self-loathing antifeminists or insatiable man-eating jezebels — or dismissed as insane — much misinformation has been spread about women (gendered, self-identified) who operate within the community.

However, the strong, independent-minded D/s women of San Francisco will have the vanilla (their term for those who do not engage in BDSM activities) know that BDSM is not what you think. Indeed, BDSM: It’s Not What You Think! premiered last year at the Frameline Film Festival. Frameline, the longest-running film festival dedicated to LGBT programming, featured a cast of prominent figures in the San Francisco leather community, many of them women.

For the women of bondage in our city, many of whom maintain 24/7 D/s relationships, BDSM is considered a liberating force. The following profiles are shout-outs to just some of these women, each representing a different facet within the BDSM spectrum. Most have participated in the community for more than a decade — and all really, really love what they do.

In San Francisco, the old Rousseauian adage "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains," could easily be rephrased as: "Woman is born free, and everywhere she uses chains to get off".

Madison Young, photographed by Pat Mazzera

MADISON YOUNG, THE INGÉNUE

Madison Young refers to herself as the "kinky girl next door." With blue eyes, strawberry blonde hair, and a translucent, Kidmanesque complexion, Young is one of the most recognizable performers in the adult entertainment industry, though perhaps more recognizable to those who enjoy inflicting pain on women tied with rope.

"I found a Kink.com posting on Craigslist," Young says. "I had been involved in kinky sex before then, and was really into things like fisting and golden showers and light bondage. But I had never really done flogging or anything around rope bondage. Peter [Ackworth] was the first person who ever tied me up, and I fell in love with it instantly." Since then, she’s become famous, adored by fans for her raw, honest performances and for her incredible toughness.

And Young is really, really tough. Run a simple Google Image search and you’ll find photos of her subjected to things that would make a Navy Seal weep — like being suspended from one elbow by a single rope strung from the ceiling, with her legs pulled apart as far as legs can go. Young is one of the few working models who can withstand what is known as a "category five suspension," bondage positions so grueling they can only be endured for mere seconds. "I have a really high pain tolerance," she says. On a scale of 1 to 10? "Out of the models that exist, I’m a 10."

A self-identified masochist, Young’s interest in bondage is uniquely centered around rope. "I’m not really into metal restraints, scarves, zip ties, or anything like that. It has to be rope."

Young is also among a small but growing number of women who are writing, directing, and producing porn, and runs her own production house called Madison Young Productions. She also finds time to run Femina Potens, a female-focused art gallery located in the Castro.

www.madisonbound.com; www.feminapotens.org

Midori, photographed by Constance Smith

MIDORI, THE SENSEI

Midori, the artist formerly known as Fetish Diva Midori, is adamantly opposed to being portrayed exclusively within the confines of BDSM. "A lot of people, sure, see my bondage stuff. But that’s just one of many, many things that I do."

That may be so, but all the same, you can’t talk about San Francisco’s women of bondage without including a legend like Midori. While she might claim "I don’t distinguish S-M, because it’s just all sexuality," she is a huge personality, respected sex-educator, and popular author in the realm of BDSM. Her sought-after bondage workshops include weekend-long intensives on "rope bondage dojo," a type of bondage she developed and trademarked.

For Midori, growing up in Japan has had an enormous impact on her work, and her heritage manifests itself not only her rope bondage specialty in but also in her academic interests. She published a collection of S-M stories titled Master Han’s Daughter based in a Tokyo of the future and developed a course on contemporary sex culture in Japan. She also has written instructional books like The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage and Wild Side: The Book of Kink and taught sex education courses all over the world.

Although stunning, this one-time fetish model and former professional dominatrix is wary of her status as a sex symbol. "If people appreciate my writing and enjoy my classes and get something out of it, and dig my work because of my art and my activism and stuff that I do, hey, that’s great. I think I’m, like, way past the age of being the pretty something, because after all I’m well in my 40s. There are certain people in my private life, well, I hope they think I’m sexy. But beyond that, I hope people appreciate my work because of its content."

www.planetmidori.com; www.ropedojo.com

Simone Kross, photographed by Constance Smith

SIMONE KROSS, THE ROLLING STONE

The perceived life of a traveling dominatrix is alluring: exotic getaways, extravagant dinners, five-star hotels transformed into makeshift dungeons. But the reality is not easy.

Says Simone Kross, a traveling pro-domme: "The perception is maybe that I am wealthy and I have clients flying me around and it’s really exotic and glamorous. It’s really not. It’s hard work, and I pay my own way. The clients and sessions help me fund getting from one place to the next, but it’s not as glamorous as it may seem. At least not for me."

Kross has no illusions about her frequently grueling work. While working out of hotels, she runs her advertising on Eros Guide, a large online erotic service listing. "I can get busy to the point where I might not see the outside of a hotel room for three or four days. After I finish my sessions I can be pretty tired, order room service, and go to bed. I could be doing sessions from one in the afternoon until 10 at night."

An added stress is traveling with heavy gear. "The biggest problem is weight requirements, because you have to keep it under 50 pounds," she says. What could be so heavy? "You’d be surprised," she says. "Leather and metal, D-rings, rope, whips. I don’t even use half the gear I pack, but you never know what someone requires for a scene. The shoes also tend to weigh quite a bit."

Explaining a suitcase full of floggers, rope, gags, whips, and harnesses to airport security might seem awkward, but Simone says "they have checked my bags because they are a little heavier, but no one has given me any problems."

You can see Kross, a gorgeous brunette with cheekbones that appear perfectly convex from every angle, in action on Men in Pain, a chapter of Kink.com.

www.simonekross.com

Natasha Strange, photographed by Constance Smith

NATASHA STRANGE, THE PRINCESSA

Now that the age of feudalism has passed, not many women can admit to having a coterie of ladies-in-waiting, so Natasha Strange’s "pink posse" — cross-dressing clients who have offered their services to her — is quite the blast from the past. And their title is not in name only: these ladies (or "sissy boys") actually do wait on Natasha.

For instance, Sissie Sandra’s responsibilities include walking Strange’s dog and running errands, duties that Sandra faithfully blogs about on a site called "Sandra in Waiting." Who knew moving someone’s car to avoid a street- cleaning ticket could be so erotic?

To her ladies-in-waiting, Strange is "the Princessa": a draconian ruler (they wouldn’t have it any other way) whose Marie Antoinette-esque whims become the word of law. With her wide blue eyes and long wavy hair, she resembles a cupcake Glinda the Good Witch, and it’s not hard to see why her pink-clad sissies have grown attached over the years.

Strange lives a charmed life. Her career began at Fantasy Makers, a fetish house in Oakland, when she was 25. Through her relationships with dedicated clients, her talents as a mistress, and sheer luck, she has fallen into a life many young dominatrices can only dream of.

She doesn’t take that luck for granted. "I have been really, really lucky to establish myself with a clientele that is really devoted to me," she says. "I don’t have to go out and hustle nearly as much as I did when I started out, even in this economy."

While she isn’t taking new clients, Strange hasn’t retired as a dominatrix just yet.

"I don’t think good dommes really retire. They sort of fade away. They take their favorite clients and they go. That’s probably what I’m starting to do. I haven’t advertised anywhere in two years. I’ve taken 90 percent of my website down. But I still have my tight-knit little group of subbies and sissies."

www.kittenwithawhip.com; sandrainwaiting.blogspot.com

Val Langmuir, photographed by Constance Smith

VAL LANGMUIR, THE ACTIVIST

If you’re not living a BDSM lifestyle, it’s unlikely that you’ve heard of the Exiles and the sizable contribution they have made to the San Francisco BDSM scene.

This group, an educational organization (for women) that teaches safe BDSM (between women), had several lives before becoming the organization it is today. Says Val Langmuir, co-coordinator, "The Outcasts was the name of the former group. It originated in 1984 and ceased to exist in 1997. The Exiles was founded in 1997 by former Outcasts and immediately held its first program: Guns, Knives, and Choking, Oh My."

While it appears as if these women enjoy flirting with death, hardcore BDSM is the reason the Exiles exist in the first place: they want to make sure women know how to engage in it and survive. Their classes have included controversial topics like "Brutal Affection: Punching, Kicking, Slapping, and Sex," "The Art of Hazardous Age Play," and a program educating attendees on breath play, or what Langmuir describes as "how not to kill yourself when engaging in erotic asphyxiation." Langmuir moved to San Francisco 12 years ago from London, where she protested the horrifying Spanner Operation in 1990 that saw 16 Manchester gay men arrested and thrown in jail for participating in BDSM. Since then, Langmuir has been dedicated to advocating the right to participate in BDSM.

She has been involved with the Exiles since its inception. "We have meetings in the Women’s Building the third Friday of every month. Usually at each meeting, I’ll see at least one new face."

www.theexiles.org

Selina Raven, photographed by Constance Smith

SELINA RAVEN, THE MRS. ROBINSON

A former Catholic schoolgirl who attributes her sadistic tendencies to "all of those Sunday mornings spent contemputf8g the bloody figure of Christ," Raven began her pro-domme career in a structured, hierarchical way: she apprenticed. "There aren’t a lot of other women who are practicing BDSM as professionals who went through the process of apprenticing themselves to an older mistress. There’s only one other woman in SF right now, Eve Minax, who has actually done things in a more traditional manner."

Now Raven is not only one of the most established mistresses in San Francisco (and a 2007 Guardian Best of the Bay winner), but something of a mentor to up-and-coming dommes. Perhaps it’s because Raven benefited personally from the tutelage of an older mistress, Sybil Holiday, that she "always resolved to be a friendly face in the community, in being that person who I wish was around when I was 18: a little wicked but armed with good information and good experiences. That’s why I see myself as Mrs. Robinson."

A popular guest lecturer at UC Berkeley and sex educator at the Academy of SM Arts, an organization based in Menlo Park with workshops around the Bay Area, Raven is a happily-settled Oaklander with a supportive leather family. "I have my slave, and I have my former apprentice. And her boy lives with us too. I do not lack for love and companionship, but it’s not in the traditional hetero-normative form."

www.selinaraven.com

EVE MINAX, THE TRANSFERRED QUEEN

"I love diapering," says Eve Minax. "Age-play is a huge force in my life."

AB/DL, which stands for adult baby/diaper-lover, is a paraphilia most people tend to find either comical or disturbing. Minax disagrees. "Diapering in and of itself isn’t about age play as much as it is about getting somebody into a primal state — that baby state, that place before you’re actually living, thinking, feeling, in civilization."

In terms of maternal figures, Minax — who is six feet tall in heels, with short spikes of orangey-red hair and a fluty, theatrical voice — looks more Auntie Mame than Mommy Dearest. That is, if Auntie Mame looked like she could flog you into an intensive care unit. (In fact, the first time I met Minax in person, her right wrist was in a cast. She sprained it while flogging a client too enthusiastically.)

And speaking of intensive care, Minax is known as much for her medical play as she is for age play — in case you’re on the market for a rectal exam.

After eight years of working in San Francisco and living in Chicago, Minax finally made the decision to make SF her home base last year, much to her own delight. "I come from Chicago. I’ve lived in Paris. I’ve lived in Melbourne. But San Francisco is the mecca for alternative sexuality. All everyone ever talked about was San Francisco! It was almost like having a religious experience. I wanted to wait until I was about to retire, but then finally I was like: fuck it, I’ll just move here."

Minax’s current projects writing a cookbook of "food and BDSM pairings", such as "pork ribs with a side of rubber gimp".

www.mistressminax.com

Editor’s note: This list is by no means exhaustive. There are an impressive number of women making an impact on San Francisco’s BDSM scene. In particular, we’d also like to give a nod to Cleo Dubois, Sybil Holiday, Madame Butterfly, Luncida Archer, Mistress Morgana, Fivestar, Maitres Madeline, Janet Hardy, Hollie Stevens, and Princess Donna.

Golden Gate suicide barrier lacks funding

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September 22, 2009

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By Sarah Morrison

The 2006 film The Bridge documented suicides from the iconic span.

It was almost a year ago that local officials decided that the Golden Gate Bridge needed a net constructed to prevent potential suicide jumpers, but with its projected price tag of $50 million, a lack of state funds threatens to delay the project indefinitely.

According to Marin County Coroner Ken Holmes, more than 1300 people have died jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge since its construction, an estimate that does not include all bridge suicides or incidences when bodies have not been found.

The Bridge Rail Foundation has been campaigning for years to raise the pedestrian safety rail on the Golden Gate Bridge and stop the suicides. While the board of directors for the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District agreed to implement the net system almost a year ago, but it’s fate now seems to come down to funding.

Canadian cinemania: one critic’s take on TIFF ’09

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September 22, 2009

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By Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

>>Check out critic Dennis Harvey’s TIFF takes here.

There were quite a number of exciting films at the 34th annual Toronto International Film Festival, though attending 21 features and 20 shorts in five days also involved some disappointments. Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Air Doll somehow dropped the ball in every which way, throwing around interesting concepts involving a sex doll who comes to life (a la The Velveteen Rabbit), but it ended up leaving me longing for Michael Gottlieb’s 1987 politically incorrect gem, Mannequin. Or Fridrik Thor Fridriksson‘s The Sunshine Boy, an Icelandic documentary about Autism around the world. Though it used Bjork and Sigur Ros on the soundtrack, it felt like an infomercial for public access. (To be fair, I saw the version with an Icelandic narrator and not the newest version with Kate Winslet reading the cues.)

Some films succeeded in minor ways, including George Romero’s fifth entry in his zombie oeuvre, Survival of the Dead. While enjoyable, this one seems to lack the political immediacy of his previous entries, including his underrated Diary of the Dead (2007). Michael Moore’s (last?) feature Capitalism: A Love Story had some brilliantly ironic moments — as always, interspersed with his typical forehead-slapping activism (do you really have to continue using minimum wage-earning security guards at major corporations as the butt of your wacky antic jokes?). It felt a bit scatterbrained. Still, the film is well worth watching and even won the runner-up audience award for Best Documentary.

The creator of the original British version of The Office had his directorial debut with The Invention of Lying. Ricky Gervais’ cynically hilarious, cameo-packed laugh-fest sadly ran out of steam during its last act, but no matter. What’s most important here is the sucker-punch moment that has Gervais flexing dramatic skills so poignantly that it literally brought tears to the entire audience. (On a side note, why doesn’t Gervais ever end up kissing his leading ladies? Is this a conscious choice to counteract the likes of Woody Allen or Vincent Gallo or is it truly due to a low-self esteem?)

Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime, Bong Joon-ho’s Mother, and Claire Denis’ White Materials all delivered solid entries, proving these directors know their craft and do it quite well — though depending on how much you may have enjoyed their previous films you may be left wanting a little less or a little more.

Found Footage Fest: “Hold the phone, is that from Eddie’s Bar Mitzvah?”

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September 21, 2009

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By Caitlin Donohue

Er ….

Rejoice, ye public access hosts, ye corporate training stooges, ye home movie starlets, for thy hour is nigh. No longer will your tapes be the viewing delight of a happenstance few. Film collagists Nick Pruehler and Joe Pickett have vaulted you into a slightly more middling level of obscurity. The fruit of their labor, The Found Footage Festival, makes its way to the Red Vic Movie House for a two night run starting Friday, October 2, bringing with it the panorama of American G-list treasures that Pruehler and Pickett have been discovering ever since a fateful trip to the back room of a McDonald’s in 1991. Discovering, scavenging, stealing — don’t get bogged down in semantics, people, it’s all part of the creative process. We recently interviewed Pruehler to discuss the profound joy produced by combining the FFF with Bay Area cush, as well as his deep-seated man love for Mr. T.

Found Footage Festival trailer

San Francisco Bay Guardian: How renegade are we talking here in terms of your video collecting techniques– do you ever dumpster dive for the tapes, or is that something you have “people” to do for you these days?
Nick Prueher: We’re not afraid to get our hands dirty and root around through garbage cans and dusty bargain bins at thrift stores in search of VHS gems. We’ll take risks to get videos. A few weeks ago, we were in a FedEx office picking up a package and happened to see a set of three VHS training videos behind the counter. When the clerk went back to grab the package, Joe snuck behind the counter and grabbed the tapes. Unfortunately, they were all pretty boring.

Celluloid scavengers Joe Pickett and Nick Pruehler

SFBG: Has anyone from the home movies ever gotten sassy on you because you put them in a showcase?
NP: Without fail, whenever we’ve met people in the videos we’ve found, they’ve been universally flattered by the fact they’ve become unintentional cult heroes of sorts. This footage that they’ve long since forgotten about is now bringing joy to hundreds of people across the country. The one close call we had was with Jack Rebney, a guy we dubbed “The World’s Angriest R.V. Salesman.” We cut together some outtakes of this guy going nuts during a promotional video for Winnebago R.V.s and it became a big hit from our first show. Then Jack found out about it and, believe it or not, was pretty pissed off. But we somehow convinced him to appear with us at a show at the Red Vic last year. He came out to a standing ovation and regaled the audience with hilarious stories from that disastrous shoot, then signed autographs for a half hour afterward. At the end of the night, we actually hugged the man.

Another wake-up call

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September 21, 2009

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By Steven T. Jones

The New York Post — or the Yes Men’s version of it — finally levels with the people about capitalism and climate change.

A few days after I wrote here about my hopes that the upcoming film “Capitalism: A Love Story” would prompt a national discussion about our doomed economic system, The Yes Men have provided another wake-up call, creating a fake New York Post website and newspapers warning of the climate change disaster we’re headed for if we don’t quickly change our wasteful, overly consumptive ways.

That stunt — a hallmark of this creative duo — precedes the Oct. 7 release of their new film, “Yes Men Save the World.” Combined with Michael Moore’s Oct. 2 release of “Capitalism,” we have an excellent opportunity for an important discussion, if only mainstream media obstacles like Post owner Rupert Murdoch would recognize economic and environmental realities. But we at the Guardian plan to facilitate the discussion over the coming weeks so stay tuned.

Can we talk about capitalism now?

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September 18, 2009

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By Steven T. Jones

Are we actually, finally, about to have a long overdue national conversation about capitalism? I really hope so, and perhaps the catalyst for that conversation can be Michael Moore’s new film, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” which I saw yesterday and which debuts in theaters on Oct. 2.

Moore doesn’t pull any punches in assailing an economic system that has created huge and growing disparities in wealth, corrupted both the public and private sectors, destroyed people’s lives and the country’s manufacturing base, and is both wasteful and unsustainable — a system that even the mainstream clergy he interviews labels as “evil.”

He makes excellent use of last year’s financial meltdown and the electoral gun that Wall Street power brokers (working inside and outside the federal government, Democrats and Republicans alike) held to the heads of Congress members in order to get their $700 billion bailout, which Moore calls a theft of the US treasury.

But it’s his use of archival footage that really brings home just how much capitalist propaganda has conditioned the American people into accepting as natural and inevitable an economic system that is so hostile to their interests. Particularly powerful was a speech that FDR made a year before his death calling for a “Second Bill of Rights” that would guarantee the right to work for livable wages, have access to affordable health care and quality education, housing that is adequate and reasonably priced, a pension and vacation time, and the resources to enjoy recreation and pursue our happiness.

These are reasonable expectations that the richest 1 percent of the country – which Moore shows as actively conspiring against basic equity, fair competition, and the common good, citing an incriminating Citibank memo among other evidence – has removed from the realm of the possible. And it’s time that the people rose up against our economic masters and demanded a new economic system that is sustainable, equitable, and just, something he shows as already starting to happen here and there.

“I refuse to live in a country like this and I’m not leaving,” Moore said toward the end of the film, soon adding, “Capitalism is an evil and you can’t regulate evil — you have to eliminate it.”

Hot sex events this week: September 16-22

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September 16, 2009

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Compiled by Molly Freedenberg

Kick off Leather Week with the Leather Walk on Sunday.

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>> Sex Workers’ Writing Workshop
Gina de Vries hosts this workshop for current and former sex workers who want to share their writing and get honest, non-judgmental feedback.

Wed/16, 6:30pm. $10-$20
Center for Sex and Culture
1519 Mission, SF
www.sexandculture.org

————-

>> IXFF Independent Erotic Film Competition Premiere
Before the film rolls, step into the Pleasure Lounge upstairs, where the drinks are cold, the dancers are hot, and guests spin to win free prizes to the sounds of live jazz and sultry burlesque.

Thurs/17, 7-10pm. $10.
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
www.goodvibes.com
>> Couple’s Massage Workshop
Join Anya Drapkin and Maggie Richardson for a two-hour workshop on massage for couples. Bring a lover or a friend.

Thurs/17
(415) 370-6499
For information or registration, email bloomingpartnerships@gmail.com

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Running with the night

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September 15, 2009

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FILM NOIR FEST The Columbia trademark: a literal goddess swathed in virginal white robes, she serenely holds aloft a torch à la the Statue of Liberty. What say we gussy her up in black satin and replace that blazing torch with a hot little .45? It seems apropos, considering the Roxie Theater is hosting a "Best of Columbia Noir" retrospective. But does the program manage to eclipse all that angelic light? Yes and no. While there is plenty of nefarious activity on display, a weirdly frequent moralizing often fails to capture the noir spirit.

Take Knock on Any Door (1949). A social justice–courtroom drama steeped in moral outrage, it has the gall to cast Humphrey Bogart not as rogue private dick but as upstanding defense attorney. As directed by Nicholas Ray, Door is a prestige picture flirting with humanity’s underbelly, eventually offering a mea culpa to wash itself clean.

Even "B" movie bona fides like The Whistler (1944) can’t help suffer a little moral affront. Its titular character operates in Rod Serling mode: part superego, part harbinger of doom. Robert Rossen’s Johnny O’Clock (1947) offers all the traditional noir elements, but dang if its criminal antihero (Dick Powell) doesn’t get redeemed by true love. When the SF-set The Lineup (1958) focuses on a pair of drug henchmen, it’s a fascinating character study; when it follows forthright SFPD detectives, it’s Dragnet.

Speaking of lineups, there’s a curious dearth of femmes fatales in this one. Even Sam Fuller, the king of exploitation with a social conscience, fails to deliver one in his otherwise crackerjack Crimson Kimono (1959), a gritty exploration of race relations in midcentury Los Angeles. Anita Ekberg camps it up in the uproarious, Freudian cheesecake-fest Screaming Mimi (1958), but her femme fatale status is seriously undermined by a lack of personal responsibility — she’s like a buxom Barbara Stanwyck with a frontal lobotomy.

Thank the dark lord for the grotesquely atmospheric and oddball Soul of a Monster (1944). It won’t be giving much away to reveal that the movie takes the femme fatale concept to its logical end. Never mind the film’s coda about faith and redemption, the sight of the devil marching resolutely through dark streets, downing power lines in her wake, obliterates all that corn. We can finally chalk one up for the bad girls.

THE BEST OF COLUMBIA NOIR

Sept. 17–30, $5–$9.75

Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com

Come a cropper

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September 15, 2009

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superego@sfbg.com

SUPEREGO I had absolutely no idea that there was a hysterical ’90s gay dance hits mashup scene!

This was just one of the many, many worlds that opened up for me as Hunky Beau and I girded our burgeoning loins and embarked one recent Saturday on a whirlwind Castro bar crawl. Despite the nutso economics of late, a large new crop of attractively unpretentious San Francisco nightspots has bloomed, from the odd-but-pleasant hunter-themed Bloodhound in SoMa (1145 Folsom, www.bloodhoundsf.com) and multi-chandeliered DJ paradise Triple Crown in Mid-Market (1760 Market, www.triplecrownsf.com) to Potrero Hill’s underground-minded Project One Gallery (251 Rhode Island, www.p1sf.com), the Mission’s jazz-inflected supperclub Coda (1710 Mission, www.codasf.com), and — hurray? — our first "dessert lounge" CandyBar in the Western Addition (1335 Fulton, www.candybarsf.com). Even a few mainstays have had fresh alt-cred life breathed into them, like absinthe-happy Buckshot Tavern (3848 Geary, SF. www.buckshot-sf.com), classy dive the Hearth (4701 Geary), and reinvigorated Madrone Lounge (500 Divisadero, www.madronelounge.com).

It’s a regular autumn harvest of buzz-heavy embarrassment opportunities — a barvest, if you will. But it’s the Castro that’s seen the most openings in the past few months, so that seemed the logical destination for a night of guzzling look-see.

For the sake of my flawless skin, I try to stay positive. Complaining about the Castro is like crapping on a pigeon: you feel a little vindication, but then you realize, "Wow, I just crapped on a pigeon." So you have to just take our increasingly generic, Kylie-nauseating gay Mecca on its own terms, acknowledging that among the upscale influx there’s at least some crazy drag and heartfelt effort at the Lookout (3600 16th St., www.lookoutsf.com), a very nice overdue remodel of the hip-pop Café (2369 Market, www.cafesf.com), with a lot fewer tiny backpacks in line to get in, even a cozy laidback alcoholic outpost called Last Call (3988 18th St., www.thelastcallbar.com), which slid right into the old Men’s Room space. And Q Bar (456 Castro, www.qbarsf.com) hosts some some damn cute weekly parties.

That hoo-hoo gay mashup scene I mentioned — think Armand Van Helden’s rejigger of "Professional Widow" by Tori Amos overlaid with Deee-Lite’s "Groove is in the Heart" and Stardust’s "Music Sounds Better with You" — was rocking a dance floor of five at the distractingly bright Toad Hall (4146 18th St., www.toadhallbar.com) but the nifty back patio was packed, mostly with amply proportioned women who’d probably wandered over from the Castro Theater’s Erotic Film Festival. I suppose apoplectic owner Les Natali is trying to somehow channel the spirit of the original clone-era Toad Hall bar through a blaze of big-screens and several hot pink waterfalls?

The cover at Trigger (2348 Market, www.clubtrigger.com) was $8.

By far the best new arrival to the cologne zone is Blackbird (2124 Market, www.blackbirdbar.com), a relaxed, narrow, and hiply appointed joint around the corner from the former Transfer, now known creatively as Bar on Church (198 Church, www.thebarsf.com). Blackbird has been in the news a lot lately due to the sad death of droll co-owner Doug Murphy from swine flu, eclipsing the happier news that the bar has quickly become one of the city’s more celebrated hotspots. Blackbird’s other co-owner, Shawn Vergara, knows that a few rough edges, a risk-taking cocktail menu — try the sparkling, tequila-based "grape drink" — and a freak-welcoming vibe stick in the mind more than wannabe polish.

As for the rest of the Castro: Is trying to do something different too much to ask? Did I just crap on a pigeon?

Liverpool

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September 15, 2009

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REVIEW Liverpool may belong to the slow club of cinema — long takes, downcast eyes, and monumental landscapes — but the friction between its patient formalism and wild terrain is anything but staid. As with Werner Herzog, Lisandro Alonso sites the existential condition in plainly inhospitable ecologies. But whereas Herzog paradoxically employs grandiloquence to remonstrate the folly of human pomposity, Liverpool‘s withdrawn narration moves with the stealth purpose of a folk tale. The story is unavoidably mythic — a sailor’s return home — but we’re liable to forget this as Alonso’s camera travels to the vanishing point of landscape and labor.

We begin inside a hulking container ship with features indistinguishable from its cargo. Perhaps it’s just the frequent nips of vodka Farrel (Juan Fernandez) takes once he’s left the ship to visit his ailing mother, but non-actor Fernandez imparts a human rawness the hollowed role might not otherwise suggest. After announcing his plans to the captain in a brief strip of exposition, he docks in dirty snow and sets off across mountainous Tierra del Fuego for a home which appears anything but.

Alonso establishes the everyday reality of the sawmill outpost with a few spare strokes, crystallizing a portrait of hardship and taciturnity that outmatches Carlos Reygadas’ similarly remote Silent Light (2007). If that film’s magical realism was self-consciously steeped in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1955), then perhaps Liverpool is under the sign of John Ford. Farrel echoes John Wayne’s famous Searchers (1956) slouch in the doorway at a crucial moment: a classic outsider pose turns in on itself as the film shifts from portraying the individual solitude to communal isolation. When Farrel disappears into the yonder, Liverpool stays behind. The remainder is both epilogue and revision, with 80 minutes of vast extrication finally condensed into a surprisingly intimate token of distance.

LIVERPOOL runs Thurs/17–Sat/19, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Take warning

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September 15, 2009

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

The forests are in flames, the desert is advancing, the glaciers have vanished, and in a solar-powered facility towering above the ice-free waters of the Arctic, some 800 miles north of Norway, a solitary older man (Pete Postlethwaite) roams the hallways of the Global Archive, a warehouse sheltering banks of data-storage servers, a civilization’s worth of art and invention, and a Noah’s ark of extinguished species. From this lonely outpost, he gravely explores a stomach-churning inquiry: "We could have saved ourselves. But we didn’t. It’s amazing. What state of mind were we in to face extinction and simply shrug it off?"

Good question, and one that Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid, a hybrid merging documentary material and a fictional frame tale, forcefully suggests we start addressing like we mean it — immediately. That is to say, before runaway climate change makes its debut and some or all of its widely forecasted ecological consequences begin to manifest, along with resource shortages, food and water riots, and massive societal collapse.

Delineating the complex global network of climate-change causes and effects, The Age of Stupid interweaves real-life documentary footage from the lives of six present-day subjects in New Orleans, the French Alps, Jordan, southwest England, a small Nigerian fishing village, and Mumbai, India. Interspersed is real and faux (future) archival footage depicting and predicting the environmental consequences of humanity’s bad habits. And all of it is presented as the digital artifacts of a dying-off civilization, preserved for uncertain posterity in the Global Archive. While covering similar terrain to that of An Inconvenient Truth (2006), the film serves as a kind of "No, but really, folks …" in the face of frighteningly incremental gestures toward sustainability — and continued shortsighted resistance — at the levels of national, state, and local government as well as citizenry.

The film’s opening sequence begins with the big bang and hurtles via countdown clock through billions of years, flying past the earliest stages of evolution, past dinosaurs, past the industrial revolution, and past the present day, the titular Age of Stupid, so fast that we barely have time to notice ourselves on the screen before it’s 2055, the Age of Too Late. The message: in the grand scheme of things, we have about a nanosecond left to kid ourselves as we refill our metal water bottle and press the start button on our Energy Star-qualified washer-dryer or Prius — or to find a way, at the level of populace, not green-minded individual, to radically swerve from our current path. According to Armstrong and her cohorts in the Not Stupid Campaign, the film’s companion activist effort, our fate will pretty much be decided by December’s climate talks in Copenhagen. (The film, which premiered in the U.K. in March, has its 50-country "global premiere" Sept. 21-22.)

So then, do the canvas bags, travel mugs, energy-saving appliances, clotheslines, CSA memberships, cycling, recycling, composting, and other ecologically minded efforts of a smattering of well-intentioned individuals matter at all? Or matter enough — in the face of factories, factory farming, methane-emitting landfills, canyons of office towers lit up 24/7, a continent-sized constellation of plastic detritus in the Pacific, and millions of trips cross-country at an average elevation of 30,000 feet?

Colin Beavan, the subject of Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein’s No Impact Man, is banking on yes, being of the "be the change you wish to see in the world" school of thought (admittedly in good company, with Mahatma Gandhi). Taking its name from Beavan’s book project and blog, No Impact Man shadows the NYC-based writer; his wife, Michelle Conlin, a senior writer at BusinessWeek admitting to "an intense relationship with retail" and a high-fructose corn syrup addiction; and their toddler daughter, Isabella, during a year in which they try to achieve a net-neutral environmental impact.

This entails giving up, in successive stages, with varying degrees of exactitude, packaged food (hard on a family whose caloric mainstay is take-out), nonlocal food (hard on a woman who drinks multiple quadruple-shot espressos a day; impossible, as it turns out), paper products (magazine subscriptions, TP), fossil-fuel-dependent transit (airplanes, elevators, and even the subway), electricity (i.e., the refrigerator), and, to a large extent, trash. The idea is to learn empirically — and demonstrate — which behaviors might be permanently ditched and which are virtually hardwired.

There are, predictably, certain criticisms –- from irritated environmentalists, from semianonymous blog commenters, from the New York Times Home and Garden section. There is the matter of giving up public transportation rather than championing it, and the issue (raised by a community gardener who takes Beavan under his wing) of Conlin’s laboring for a high-circulation publication that trumpets capitalist virtues antithetical to the project of tapering off consumption and waste. And Beavan sometimes comes across, particularly in the book, as well-meaning but stubbornly myopic in his focus on self-improvement.

Then again, the guy and his family gave up toilet paper, electric light, motor vehicles, spontaneous slices of pizza, and many deeply ingrained habits of wastefulness for a year while most of the rest of the country got up each morning and brushed their teeth with the water running. What impact the No Impact project might have on, for instance, the mounds of trash-filled Heftys that line Manhattan’s sidewalks each week remains to be seen. But as the Age of Stupid winds down, it’s probably a waste of time to fault anyone’s attempts to forestall the Age of Too Late.

NO IMPACT MAN opens Fri/18 in Bay Area theaters.

THE AGE OF STUPID plays Mon/21, 8 p.m., SF Center. Visit www.ageofstupid.net for additional Bay Area screenings.

Michael Moore coming to SF

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September 15, 2009

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By Steven T. Jones

We’re now getting word that the Commonwealth Club’s Inforum speakers series has just landed a big fish for this week: filmmaker Michael Moore, whose new “Capitalism: A Love Story” promises to make a big splash when it hits theaters on Oct. 2 (check out the glowing review of the film by Beyond Chron’s Randy Shaw, who saw an advanced showing yesterday at the AFL-CIO national convention).

Inforum officials tell us Moore will speak here in San Francisco on Thursday evening, Sept. 17, although details and ticket information haven’t yet been posted on the club’s website, although that’s expected soon. More to come.

Sexy celluloid: Good Vibrations Independent Erotic Film Festival artists speak!

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September 14, 2009

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By Louis Peitzman

Festivities for the fourth annual Good Vibrations Independent Erotic Film Festival (aka IXFF) are now underway — but the main event is a film screening Thurs/17 at the Castro. What follows is the first installment in a series of interviews with filmmakers from the fest.

Filmmaker: Petra Joy
Film: Hardback

San Francisco Bay Guardian: What was the inspiration for your film?
Petra Joy: I wanted to show the power play between this real life couple. Even though she is usually more dominant and he is the (hunky) submissive, their sexuality is fluid and flows freely. The resprect each other and it turns them on to pleasure each other in body, mind and soul.I also wanted to break the big taboo of women penetrating men and celebrate the prostate as a highly erogenous zone.

SFBG: What did you hope to accomplish with it?
PJ: I wanted to show that s/m sex does not have to be extreme and role patterns not cast in stone. Just becasue he licks her feet does not mean that she will not enjoy to be penetrated by him. I hope to inspire women and men to experiment more and make their fantasies come true – far away from all the definitions of gender roles and classifications of sexuality they are often hemmed in by.