Hundreds of people– teachers, administrators, school staff, parents, children, union members, state and city officials– gathered in front of the State Building at McAllister and Van Ness, to demand job security for educators and to put education at the top of California’s priority list.
Governor Schwarzenegger’s 2008-09 budget proposes a $4.8 billion cut in state education funds. This would create a $40 million deficit for the San Francisco Unified School District and, in anticipation, the City’s Board of Education sent out 535 pink slips to administrators and certified teachers this week. Paraprofessionals and support staff wait in limbo to learn how many of their positions are on the chopping block.
Organization and activism were in full effect at the rally: participants wore pink clothes, and carried pink balloons and signs to flaunt their opposition to termination notices; letters were written to Schwarzenegger; people carried signs reading ‘Sell a Hummer, Fund a School’ and ‘Terminate the Terminator’; chants of ‘Books Not Bombs!’ rang out; car horns blared in support.
Superintendent Carlos Garcia, who was in Sacramento yesterday with 100 state superintendents and 60 City principals to speak out against the cuts, displayed an oversized pink slip addressed to Arnold, and incited the crowd with the statement, “The fight is just starting…let’s keep the fight going!”
A number of local politicians offered words of outrage towards Schwarzenegger, as well as support of educators. Mayor Gavin Newson stated, “It goes without saying that we are opposed to the governor’s cuts.” He added that the city is not going to sit back and wait for the state to solve its woes, noting “There’s a $40 million problem, but we have a $30 million solution in our back pocket.” This refers to the City’s current $122 million rainy day fund that would divert 25% one-time infusion to SFUSD during a crisis.
State Assembly members Mark Leno and Fiona Ma also spoke. Both made specific mention of a bill, to be introduced tomorrow by Democrats in Sacramento, proposing a 6% severance tax on oil production in the state, as well as well as a 2% windfall profits tax on oil companies that could create $1.2 billion in funds to mitigate budget cuts. State Senator Carole Midgen vowed “We will never let them cut our schools”, and Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi called this endeavor a “Fight against the lack of common sense” of the Governor.
The stars of the day were the teachers, and one who received a pink slip is Tara Ramos. She is a second year probationary teacher of Spanish in 4th and 5th grades at Paul Revere Elementary in Bernal Heights. Revere is one of eight Dream Schools in SFUSD, which face especially rigorous standards in the No Child Left Behind era because a majority of students are at-risk, non-native speakers, and low proficiency.
Ramos said, “100% of the staff told the principal they want to come back,” in a recent staff meeting, yet 21 of 30 certified teachers got served notices this week, and many paraprofessionals have job insecurity.
While explaining the ‘Program Improvement’ requirements of NCLB–where standardized test scores are analyzed by factors such as race–Ramos stated, “Look at our population of kids at Paul Revere…the number of white kids you can count on one hand.” The irony of the whole situation is not lost on her or her colleagues: the tough schools that are full of young teachers face the most uncertainty; layoffs and rehirings create a cyle of shortages and voids; teachers are under constant scrutiny to raise test scores, and now have to worry about their jobs.
“It’s not fair,” Ramos said adamantly. Yet, her priority remains the children. “I’m not so worried about my job. I’m here for the kids…I can get another job.”
As Superintendent Garcia stated, the fight is just starting, so pay attention to this important issue. Write, call, or email the Governor’s office if you are opposed to his cuts, and hold all the officials accountable to their promises of support and finances. This is a social justice issue at its core.
Kids
Rally Against Pink Slips
Hey napkin-doodler! Win this …
Yep, it’s that time again — time for the Mama’s Royal Cafe Annual Napkin Art Contest!
2006 winner!
The fave-rave Oakland cafe is presenting it’s 26th one of these suckers — and your noodle-doodle entry could snag you $400, or any one of 32 other fabulous prizes (including free breakfast.
2007 First runner up!
All those years of crayoning your placemat could finally pay off … but get to scribblin’ kids, the deadline is March 31. We eagerly await seeing your entry displayed in Mama’s incomparable online napkin art gallery.
Use only what you need!
Clubs: Gem sweaters, buenos Zizeks, grimy Rupture, divas
Too too much going on this Saturday March 8, kids, and these are just the above-ground parties! I don’t know how I’m gonna make ‘em all, but we just finished work on the next issue of Scene, our nightlife mag which drops next wednesday in the guardian (look for it!) and I’m ready to party my pumps off. Good thing I always carry an extra pair of bedazzled flats in my Safeway paper bag purse …
Leslie and the Lys, spaz-hop queens straight outta Iowa (via Boston) who recorded the immortal line “Wearing gold spandex pants/ I made a hip-hop album” will be rocking their goddam GEM SWEATERS at an early set (9pm) at the lezbo-rock heavenly Cockblock at Rickshaw Stop for only 10 stinkin’ bucks, which lets you stay the whole evening to hear the adorable DJ Nuxx and friends throw down.
Then it’s off to Kafana Balkan at 12 Galaxies (more info here), the city’s premier Romany dance party, with awesome, way-deeper-than-Balkan-Beatbox DJ Zejlko and friends. If it’s anything like the last one (with crazy pics we featured in the last Scene nightlife magazine) then we may not be able to tear ourselves away ….
Brass Menazerie at Kafana Balkan
to hit up one of the best-sounding parties at Mezzanine in, like, a week – Zizek featuring DJ/Rupture and Tormenta Tropical.
Say hello to my little Ferrari
Every time I hear a Giorgio Moroder track, I am transported back to an exclusive Miami disco in the early ’80s. I’m Cuban drug lord Tony Montana, in my white polyester suit, disco dancing with the robotic, all-bangs, ultrablond Elvira Hancock. Her heavily stylized and mechanical moves are only bolstered by her last three nose-powdering bathroom trips.
Fast-forward to a recent Saturday night at sleek Italo-disco night Ferrari, a monthly fundraiser for volunteer-based, DIY station 93.7 FM West Add Radio at Deco Lounge. While drug cartel members, big-name celebrities, and models were noticeably absent, the club — still in its infancy and more baby powder than coca powder — is still very insider-y, attracting a notable crew of local DJs, promoters, and scene makers.
Hitting the dance floor, I was surrounded by a who’s who of San Francisco party throwers like Parker Day (Stiletto), Rchrd Oh?! (Hold Yr Horses, Lights down Low), and Juanita More (Trannyshack, Booty Call) among a mixed crowd of Mission kids, gay Tenderloin hipsters, and drag queens, all bumping on the dance floor to every conceivable disco subgenre — whether it was Italo, Euro, or Hi-NRG from assorted decades.
DJs Christopher Vick (Gemini, Paradise), Jordan (House Parties), Nicky B (Electric Boogie), and Connor and Primo (Night Beat), who mix more obscure ’80s dance artists Klein and MBO with innovator Donna Summer, describe their records simply as "robot rock."
As I passed a couple of girls dancing like automatons — with blond, heavy-on-the-bangs hair — I prepared to mourn the day this club is discovered by Bridgette and Tunnel. Maybe promoters can hire a machine gun–wielding security team to keep out the riffraff. But disco’s inherent inclusivity, bringing everyone together for an orgy of music and revelry, means biting the bullet and passing on the ammunition.
FERRARI
Second Saturdays, 10 p.m.–2 a.m., $5
Deco Lounge
510 Larkin, SF
(415) 346-2025, www.decosf.com
World of echo
It’s been 20 years since My Bloody Valentine released their breakthrough album, Isn’t Anything (Creation) — long enough for it to be wound up in a younger generation’s musical DNA. For how frequently the band is referenced by both musicians and critics, the rich double-sidedness of MBV’s peculiar attack often gets simplified as "swooning" and "ethereal." Erstwhile Deerhunter vocalist Bradford Cox is one of the few shoegaze suitors who seems clued in to the searing — and often distressing — tensions that distinguish My Bloody Valentine from followers like Slowdive and Ride. In Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel (Kranky), his first official release as Atlas Sound, Cox has worked out an exquisite combination of shoegaze and laptop pop, a fucked-up beauty waiting to be adored.
A self-described "queer art punk," the young Atlantan first turned heads for his Internet indiscretions and outré performances with Deerhunter. The words Cox used to describe author Dennis Cooper in ANP Quarterly may as well be his own propulsive mantra: "The only thing he does to infuriate so many people is to write honestly, expressing things that most people would prefer to stay far under the surface."
While Cox’s transgressions have previously edged up to mawkishness, Let the Blind channels his confessional tendencies into a newly retrospective shape. Atlas Sound’s source material, aesthetic means, and subject are inextricable from one another in the same manner as Jonathan Caouette’s first-person film, Tarnation (2003). Much glitchier than Deerhunter’s Cryptograms (Kranky, 2007), the Atlas Sound home recordings are almost exclusively about the soul-baring, delicious isolation of being alone in your adolescence. Cox has described "Quarantined" as being about children with AIDS, though the main refrain, "I am waiting to be changed," resonates with Morrissey-like wistfulness.
The music on Let the Blind drifts uneasily between bliss and terror, the heavily doctored mélange of glockenspiels and guitars conjuring a narcoleptic glow. Drone pieces like "Small Horror" and "On Guard" concentrate on specific intense emotions, while fuller arrangements like "River Card" and "Bite Marks" entangle youthful romantic obsession in soft-hewn bass melodies and howling vocals. The shoegaze textures may be Cox’s equivalent of Proust’s madeleine, but it’s in the treated, divested vocal tracking that Let the Blind achieves its deepest immersions.
On "Winter Vacation," the chords seem to be pulling each other apart, reaching for different resolutions — so too with the rest of the album’s balancing act of sensuousness and numbness — though never so far apart as we think. Cox has written extensively about aiming for catharsis on his heavily trafficked blog, but Let the Blind comes off more as a prismatic refracting of past intensity and indolence. It’s teenage confusion done in Technicolor, and that ought to be enough to change more than a few kids’ lives.
ATLAS SOUND
With White Rainbow and Valet
Sat/8, 10 p.m., $10
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
Flowers
› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com
CHEAP EATS I see flowers very differently. Not because I’m a woman now, or a softy, or insane, or even a chicken farmer. It’s a kid thing. I learned it from little Clara de la Cooter, who bonked into the world a year ago and very quickly became my new favorite person in it.
Probably not a lot of people get to babysit their ex’s kids. So I’m lucky in that sense, and so is Clara. She’s a passionate eater — I daresay a budding foodie. Her favorite food so far is eggs. I’m just saying …
It’s not hard to imagine who her favorite auntie will be, I’m saying.
Today I saw an ad on the side of a truck that said, "Just the freshest eggs you will ever eat." I forget the brand, but if its slogan is true, then I highly recommend it. Its eggs will be sold not by the carton but by the chicken. Yo, I’ve held warm ones in my hands on cold days between the nest and the skillet. I’ve had to postpone lunch until almost dinnertime because somebody was all stopped up.
And the boys who I’ve dated have not tended to bring flowers. But that’s OK, because most of them never knew they were dating me. I like to think of Clara de la Cooter’s first date. Some awkward, googly kid hands her a flower and she laughs.
"What?" they say, offended.
But if they knew her now, they would know better. The girl just cracks up at the sight of flowers. That’s all. For some reason they are the funniest thing in the world to her. They’re hilarious. She points and giggles, and she laughs her head off. And I think that’s beautiful. More beautiful than I used to think flowers were.
I’m inspired. I want to laugh at flowers too, and I think there’s a chance I might learn to. Yesterday we took two walks together. It’s spring. It’s Berkeley. I held her in bushes and she kicked her legs and squealed with pleasure, rattling the leaves and branches. I pushed her stroller right up into pink ones, purple ones, white ones, yellow ones, and she pointed and laughed and touched and tugged. That she also tried to eat them goes without saying, don’t you think?
Under a lemon tree I wheelied the stroller back so she could look straight up into it. The tree was loaded, and she lost it. She busted a gut. All that yellow, it was early Woody Allen to her. If she hadn’t been so strapped in, she’d have been rolling on the sidewalk.
I want this. I want one. And that alternative-weekly groan you’re hearing is all my old friends, because they know how I used to be. And people tend to expect you to stay the same. Especially those who love you most.
Which reminds me that one day Clara will not be so tickled by flowers, or not in the same way. Maybe she’ll have allergies. I had a fantasy, under the lemon tree with her, that I would live to be 84, and that she would ask me, hopefully over dinner, what she was like when she was one.
Like I started asking my own parents, and at least one of my aunts, a couple years ago. They didn’t seem to know much, maybe because I was 1 of 11. Or they forgot. Which … I don’t have the world’s best memory myself. Already. What I will have is an excessively creased and yellow newspaper clipping in my apron pocket, where I’ve been keeping it for 40 years, just in case. "You found flowers very funny," it will say. And: "We laughed till we cried."
Making limeade out of lemons is my motto in life. This was someone else’s tree, of course, but I picked a small, hard one and put it in Clara’s little hand, unwashed, let her gum and suck it. And a couple of sidewalk squares later I saw, and picked, one tiny wild strawberry, the size of a pea. This I put in her other hand, knowing she’d eat it. And that it might have been sprayed, or peed on by a dog.
——————————————————————–
My new favorite restaurant is one of my old favorite restaurants, but I never told you. It’s the 55-year-old Cinderella Russian Bakery in the Richmond, where I refueled with my soccer buds recently and dripped sweat and blood (from my nose) onto stuffed cabbages, garlicky potatoes, homemade bread, and dill in general. Wow! I think my mates were looking for more like, you know, breakfast, but for my money this is just the thing.
CINDERELLA RUSSIAN BAKERY
435 Balboa, SF
(415) 751-9690
Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.–7 p.m.
Beer and wine
AE/DC/V
And also, herpes
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
You guessed right — those letters about women who can’t have orgasms were both mine. Maybe I was so frustrated that I lied about my age so you wouldn’t think they were from the same person. Anyway, I’m in a stupidly worse situation now: I contracted herpes, despite having had sex with only one other human being. My boyfriend engaged in some ill-advised polyamorous experimentation about two years ago: I agreed to it even though I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. And he proposed it even though he was pretty sure it wasn’t a good idea, either.
It’s just HSV-1, but I can’t get over how unfair it is. I don’t even like oral sex! I have this irrational feeling of being punished. I hear that HSV-1 isn’t nearly as bad as HSV-2, and that I might never even have another outbreak (though it doesn’t feel that way). Plus, my boyfriend keeps saying that around 20 percent of Americans have genital herpes, which sucks because that means 80 fucking percent don’t.
While I love my partner, I never thought he’d be the only person I’d ever sleep with. However, I’m shy: having to have the pre-sex "I have an STD" talk means that I’ll just avoid sex. Since I wasn’t enjoying it anyway, this shouldn’t bother me. But now, I feel disgusting too. My boyfriend admitted that he had to leave school on STD Day because he was so completely grossed out that he felt faint. At least he’s unlikely to get it, since HSV-1 doesn’t like to jump from genitals to genitals.
Add to all this the fact that I don’t really want to be touched sexually, and you get the result that my boyfriend is unhappy too. Of course, now that I regret having just one relationship so far, I’m screwing that one up. It’s like some kind of terrible paradox.
I know that I’m overreacting, but I’m just so mad and unhappy. I know that outbreaks can be treated, blah, blah, blah, but then I’m just a less-ulcerated, less-contagious plague carrier. I know that I have to talk to some kind of therapist before I become even more messed up, but I thought that someone whose area of expertise is sex would be a good first person to ask.
Love,
Angry and Contagious
PS: Thank you for your previous advice, but I don’t think Betty Dodson will be advising me until everything involved doesn’t hurt.
Dear Contagious:
Sorry, nope. You totally have to talk to a therapist as well as a gynecologist, but mostly to a therapist — and possibly a psychiatrist too. Don’t you think you’re depressed and anxious enough to benefit from at least contemputf8g medication? I do!. And maybe you should speak to a yoga master about learning deep-breathing techniques. Or get a paper bag and breathe into it until you pass out or don’t pass out — however that trick is supposed to work.
First off, do we know how you got the genitally located oral herpes? We do not. Do we know that the introduction of the GLOH to your ménage was due to one of the women your boyfriend kissed during that brief foray into ill-advised polyamory? We don’t know that, either. Unless there’s something you haven’t told me, it’s possible that the boyfriend either picked it up somewhere far less ooky (it’s only oral herpes, after all) or already had it but it hadn’t made an appearance yet. Furthermore, do we believe that you had to agree to doing something that even your guy thought was a bad idea? Nuh-uh. I know you were young and silly, but so was he. I’d chalk that one up to "our bad" and move on.
You’re going to have to disentangle your anger with your boyfriend from your beef with fate and, for that matter, yourself. What happened happened, and hey, it could be worse. By the way, about 20 percent of Americans have genital herpes but somewhere between 50 and 80 percent have the oral version, so you’ve a ton of company — and some of it is quite nice.
If you drag your angry self to a clinic or to your regular gyno you can get on an antiviral, which will not only suppress your symptoms but make it far less likely that you could spread this thing to a putative future boyfriend that you don’t even want, especially since you still like the one you have. Then you won’t hurt as much and can get back to where you were before: frustrated, angry, and bitter because sex isn’t any fun for you. And then you can go see a therapist. And then, after that, maybe Betty Dodson and I can help you.
And before you think me unsympathetic, I’m really and truly not. I just think you need a swat on the behind to stop dithering in fury and start fixing stuff. I swat because I love.
Love,
Andrea
Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.
Your computer is doomed
› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION Ten years from now, surfing the Web won’t require a computer. So says futurist Jamais Cascio, a researcher with Silicon Valley’s forecasting think tank Institute for the Future. He’s been following the development of the Web for years, serving as a consultant to Web industry groups such as Mozilla, makers of the popular Firefox browser, about directions they might want to take their research over the next 10 years. He
believes the Web itself might not change much, but the way we get information from it will.
The Web, Cascio told me recently, will come to us on all kinds of devices. Already people can stream movies from the Web to a mobile, or grab a radio show from the British Broadcasting Corporation Web site to listen to on an iPod. But in a few years, all these devices will be far more specialized. You might have a special pocket-size electronic map that’s just for grabbing maps off the Web and displaying them in a simple format. At the same time, every device you own will become computer-network-ready. Instead of having a 50-inch plasma-screen TV and a computer monitor, you’ll just have a big flat-screen monitor that you can use to tune into Torchwood or read your favorite blogs. Why have two monitors when TV and the Web are both streamed over the Internet, anyway?
Cascio thinks that in the next couple of decades, Web devices will become aware of human presence, turning on and off as people move from place to place. "It wouldn’t be difficult to have your movie stop on your cell phone when you came home, and then get picked up on your big TV," he suggests.
I love this idea because it’s a corrective to the lazy futurist notion that computers will just keep evolving into bigger and better machines, with more (or fewer) blinking lights depending on who is telling the story. Think of all the sci-fi you’ve seen where everybody basically has a Macintosh 50 years from now, but the screen is transparent and dangles in the air. Or the keyboard is made of light instead of plastic. Few people are willing to challenge the regime of the PC and boldly state that this important technology will merge with other ones and basically cease to exist.
But if you look at the history of communications tech, Cascio’s vision makes more sense than a tomorrowland filled with computers that have to stay stationary at a desk and are operated by that old-fashioned typing thing. After all, a more evolved society will at least have gotten rid of typing, since it’s crippled so many people with repetitive stress injuries over the past two decades.
In the future, people will expect ubiquitous Internet access. We will be
comfortable with the idea that we live in a haze of information, and we’d be shocked at the idea that we should need one particular kind of tech to get at it. Already, the profusion of Internet-enabled mobiles attests to this shift in perception. But I’m talking about a shift that goes deeper: one that comes at a moment when everyone, not just the kids and the techies, is completely at ease with the idea that their bodies will always be connected in some way to a data network.
Yeah, in some sense I’m talking about the death of privacy as we have known it. But I’m also talking about breaking down the information juggernaut into little pieces that are easier to control. Maybe your movie will follow you from room to room, but you’ll also have more control over the devices that make that happen. Shutting off the network’s access to you may become as simple as shutting your eyes.
Or maybe it won’t. Maybe your individuality will be stripped away with your privacy, and you’ll have no room to screw up or be subversive because everything you do will be uploaded immediately to Facebook.
My personal theory is that as the Internet becomes a part of our bodies,
we’ll gain a new kind of privacy — call it temporal privacy. There will be so much information swarming around us that nobody will ever be the center of attention for very long. So you may be infamous as a dork today, but in five minutes the next dork will drift across everyone’s retina screens and they’ll forget about your Star Wars dance as they laugh at some kid’s Segway accident.
In the future, your infamy will not be remembered. Is that comforting?
I’m not entirely sure.
Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who
did something really bad about 20 minutes ago, but you’ve already
forgotten about it.
Editor’s Notes
› tredmond@sfbg.com
When Jerry Brown was governor of California, he was almost done in by the Mediterranean fruit fly. So he knows a thing or two about bug infestations and aerial spraying.
It was 1981, and Brown, approaching the end of his second and final term, was running for a spot in the United States Senate. He was the odds-on favorite to win the seat being vacated by the Republican S.I. Hayakawa; his chief Republican rival was a mild-mannered and hardly charismatic San Diego mayor named Pete Wilson.
But that summer, the fruit flies, known as medflies, started showing up in residential areas, mostly in gardens and fruit trees outside of San Francisco. Farmers worried that the pest could spread to the central valley and points south — and experts warned that the state stood to lose $1 billion per year if the agricultural industry got hit.
The flies breed rapidly and turn fresh fruit to mush. That would have been bad for growers. Even worse, the rest of the country was so worried about the tiny creatures that any sign of a commercial crop infestation might have led to a nationwide boycott of California produce.
Brown, still the staunch environmentalist, ordered the California Conservation Corps to strip the fruit off trees in the affected areas, and he ordered the release of millions of sterile flies to interrupt the mating cycles. As it turns out, the shipment of supposedly sterile flies from a Peruvian lab included at least some that were fertile; Brown argued that the error prevented the ecologically sound alternative from working.
But for whatever reason, the flies continued to spread — so the chorus from agribusiness got louder and louder. They wanted aerial saturation spraying of the pesticide malathion.
But Brown resisted. "All I could think about," he told me 10 years later, "was poison raining down from the sky."
That’s all a lot of environmentalists could think about too. The governor was knocked around like a ping-pong ball, to the delight of a mainstream media that never much liked or respected Jerry Brown. And in the end, he caved: helicopters, flying five abreast in military-style formation, began carpet bombing hundreds of square miles of mostly residential areas, dumping a chemical that a lot of critics argued could have untold long-term health effects.
The indecision pissed off the conservatives. The final outcome pissed off the environmentalists. Brown lost the Senate race.
When I talked to him about the decision, it was 1991 and I was writing a book — and Brown was mounting a surprisingly strong run for president. In retrospect, Brown thought the spraying was wrong. He thought he had to do it, but he felt horrible about it. Back then, he was a progressive populist.
And now he’s California’s attorney general, and he’s defending the state’s plans to bombard San Francisco, Marin, and the East Bay with an artificial pheromone wrapped in tiny plastic bubbles to eradicate the light brown apple moth (see page 10). I know all the arguments, but please: I have two little kids now. It’s a nasty chemical, raining down on us from the sky.
The medflies came back. So will the moths. Brown wants to come back to his old job too. You wonder if he’s learned anything.
Lick your pickle, kids
Hey, kids! Can you feel the heat? Ready to cool down with a nice tart treat? Then wrap your lips around a big frozen pickle.
Yep, that’s right — you’ll be cool as a cucumber with this doozy: The Pickle Sickle, which despite it’s name is NOT a preserved fruit bearing grim death. It’s a Popsicle made of picle juice, which the makers tout as a healthy alternative to sugar-laden frozen treats. It’s “made from the whole pickle!” (Not just the gizzard and feet.) Plus, you’ll look really cool:
Seriously! Holy frozen pickles, there’s even a theme song
On like him
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
I’m typing this with one hand, because I’m patting myself on the back with the other. According to Eddi Projex himself, I’m the first writer to ever interview him, back in 2003 when he was a member of Hittaz on tha Payroll, who’d just released their retail debut, Ghetto Storm (Hitta). It was the tail end of the Bay’s turn-of-the-century commercial drought, yet the group — including Polo, Curcinado, and Fletchberg Slim — sold almost 4,000 copies. On April 6, 2005, I wrote a Guardian piece on Projex when he had a BET video hit with "Drank-A-Lot," featuring his former mentor Numskull and Money B.
Now here we are again, and while I claim no credit for Projex’s success, I can’t help feeling gratified. I knew he just needed a shot and he got one: his Bedrock-produced single, "On like Me," was one of the hottest Bay records of 2007, despite the increasing difficulty of getting local music on the radio. Showcasing the skillful hook-writing evident on Ghetto and "Drank," "On like Me" confirms Projex’s status as one of the top three post–Mistah FAB Oakland rappers, along with Beeda Weeda and J-Stalin.
"I’ve always jumped on the hook," says Projex. "That’s the most important part of the song. You could be the rawest verse-writing nigga ever, but if you ain’t got the catchy hook, the raps don’t mean shit."
At that time, hyphy was heavy, he recalls: "I almost bit. I took the beat to the studio, got to talking about shakin’ dreds, and D-Kash [who signed Eddi to Hi-Speed Records] says, ‘Eddi, that ain’t you.’ So I went to my car, put the CD in, and blasted it. And I just started rappin’: ‘Candy on the paint / Chrome on the feet / Is anybody out there on like me?’ I took that bit for the hook, put everything together. Called that nigga the next morning — check this out! He was, like, ‘Yeah!‘
"FAB was, like, let me hear that," Projex continues. "Then he called me, like, ‘Eddi, this the one!’ He played it that Friday on Yellow Bus Radio."
"The response was crazy," Mistah FAB confirms. "Rick Lee from KMEL gave it a chance, then Mind Motion. It just took off."
Unfortunately, Projex wasn’t prepared to consolidate his success. "Album was nowhere near done," he concedes. "I just had a song on the radio. It jumped off, and I wasn’t ready for it." It wasn’t until the end of the year that Projex dropped his album, Now or Never (Hi-Speed/Payroll), which includes the "On like Me" remix with FAB and Too $hort as well as new singles, "Wiggleman," produced by Bedrock, and "Breezy," produced by the Mekanix and highlighting Keak da Sneak.
While Now brims over with grimy street raps, it also shows Projex’s deeper side, reflected in such tracks as the love song "I’m Feeling You," the politically minded "That’s Right," and the homage to family life, "Grown Man."
"My grandma love that song," Projex says of "Grown Man." "I’m not afraid to say I got a wife and kids. I’m still a player though. But I try to make music that everybody listens to. I’m a well-rounded dude." Though the tracks are way more gangsta, those numbers make Now arguably the most lyrically substantial street record since FAB’s Baydestrian (Faeva Afta/SMC, 2007).
What makes Projex’s positive songs so powerful, moreover, is his undeniable street cred. The 26-year-old rapper, born Eddie Scott, hails from East Oakland’s Stonehurst district, a.k.a. Stone City.
"That’s the last turf in East Oakland besides Sobrante, on the border of San Leandro," he explains. "Basically the 100s. That’s the first place I seen rocks selling, sold a rock, whatever. When Stone City was created, there wasn’t no rolling 100s. Then everybody came together to rep the 100s."
Wanting to set him on the right path, Projex’s mother sent him to Berkeley High School to pursue a promising football career, which was cut short by a shattered ankle. In his sophomore year, he dropped out to sell crack in Stone City and hooked up with Hittaz on tha Payroll, who became Numskull’s crew when the Luniz broke up.
By the time he was 18, Projex was traveling across the country with Numskull, from Los Angeles to New York City, rubbing shoulders with elite rappers like Xzibit, Jayo Felony, and Wu-Tang Clan. Though he and Numskull have since parted ways, Projex remains grateful for the experience, which separates him from the majority of his peers, many of whom have yet to venture East.
"I’ve seen the light, so I want that back," Projex says. "But this time I’m going to be in that light. I still got my Hitta roots, but I’m trying to make music for the masses. I’m trying to go putf8um and make millions."
What a pain
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Readers:
In the process of starting to crawl out of my "I just had two babies! Leave me alone!" cocoon, I’ve been teaching some new workshops, one on what it’s really like to have twins, and one that I’m calling "Is There Sex after Motherhood?" — hoping the idea comes across even though motherhood is, technically, a lifelong venture ending in death, after which, one assumes, not so much sex. I debuted the sex one recently at the original "clean, well-lighted place for buying things to stick up your hoo-ha," Good Vibrations. There was a decent crowd, and everybody seemed to have a good time; and when we got to the Q&A, I was gratified by the number of questions. (That’s how you can tell if people were interested in your presentation, right? Not so interested = polite thanks and drifting away; interested = hang around asking questions until the management kicks you out.) There’s some serious sadness haunting the new and newish mothers though, so while it’s all good and fun to talk about how a simple blow job between child care tasks can save your marriage (ask me how!), some of the questions stayed with me after we’d cleared away the cookies and juice (yes, mothers are served toddler snacks, don’t ask me why) and gone home.
It’s surely true that during the first few years after having kids, your sex life tends to be … well, "lackluster" is a nice word, but I think "laughable" might be more accurate in a lot of cases. Some of the women at these events are really beating themselves up over it though, which I guess is expected and is why I’m talking about this stuff in the first place, but one of them really saddened me when she said, quite matter-of-factly, that intercourse was still quite uncomfortable for her several years later and she hadn’t mentioned this to her husband. "I think you need to communicate with your husband," the other speaker, a therapist, offered. "I think you should find out what hurts and make it stop hurting," I countered.
How many women, mothers or not, are having painful sex and just not mentioning it? The most common cause of uncomfortable insertive sex is nothing more complicated than a case of "not ready–itis" or lack of lubrication, but a Harvard study cited by the National Vulvodynia Association (see www.nva.org/media_corner/fact_sheet.html) estimates that 16 percent of women in the United States suffer from the chronic vulvar pain called vulvodynia or its subtype, vulvar vestibulitis, affecting just the opening to the vagina. That’s a lot of women! Most are young when it starts, and most can locate no particular event or infection that set it off, but the pain can be paralyzing (many describe it as feeling like acid was poured onto sensitive tissues, or "like knives"). So we have a mysterious etiology; a location in the parts that many women simply don’t mention in public, even if that public comprises their doctor, themselves, and nobody else; and an exclusively female population of sufferers; and what do we get? Predictably, silence, confusion, and shame. And while I have never been a big fan of men-versus-women jokes and somehow doubt that if men got pregnant, ma- or paternity leave really would be two years long with full pay (come on!), if men often had agonizing, unexplained pain in their manly man parts, surely they wouldn’t have been subjected to generations of doctors pronouncing it "all in your head."
The good news — there has to be some — is that vulvodynia is finally getting the research money and attention it deserves. Recent research (see www.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/health/29brod.html?_r=1&ref=science) has turned up solid, quantifiable, and most important, curable causes of the pain: some women, the researchers found, had serious inflammation two cell layers deep that had not responded to steroids, a typical treatment. What’s even more interesting is that many of the women have a genetic abnormality — as I’m sure they could’ve guessed, considering the kind of hypersensitivity they’ve been putting up with — in which there are too many nerve fibers in the area, which produces a pain response to what in other women would just be normal sensation, like the pressure from your jeans against your crotch while seated. The linked article contains some success stories; the treatments (surgical or medical) are not perfect, but they have the potential to make life worth living again for some women who’ve been silently suffering, too embarrassed or too debilitated to say anything about it. That does count as good news, no?
I don’t really see a National Crotch Pain Month hitting the calendar anytime soon, but I do see this as the beginning of the end of one more way for women to suffer in silence and shame, so a cautious hooray for that.
Love,
Andrea
Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.
Klubz: Lights Down Low – turn it up!
Lingering in the ‘Loin. Photo by Joshua Rotter.
By Joshua Rotter
When the lights are turned low and the music is turned up, it’s time to get down at Lights Down Low. This biweekly party in the heart of the Tenderloin’s seediest section at Hyde and Turk brings much-needed festivity to an otherwise bedraggled block.
The stylish crowd encompasses the latest local hipperatti, all the kids you see leaving Academy of Art College and entering gainful employment at Flax or one of the many retail clothing stores around the city. And you don’t even have to enter the club, hosted by DJ’s Sleazemore and Rchrd Oh?! and highlighting a revolving group of guest DJs, to see these seen-and-be-scenesters: many line the sidewalk out front, drinking from paper bags while debating whether Bob Dylan or Neil Young is the greatest singer-songwriter of all time. All that was missing from this style council’s spectacle were the passing tour buses of yesteryear from which tourists once gawked at the city’s wildlife.
Once inside, if you are fortunate enough to navigate past the narrow bar packed with peeps, make your way down to the crowded basement dance floor where the hi-octane electro, disco, and hip-hop jams will have you bumping. If you do down a few brews, be prepared to hold it, because those lines inside means the queues outside loos are as difficult to penetrate as the most exclusive VIP rooms. When bathroom breakers return to the dimly lit dance floor, their olfactory senses may be dulled, but they’re ready to dance and make romance, ’cause when the lights go down, the DJs give them something they can feel.
Lights Down Low
Second and fourth Fridays of the month, 10 p.m.-3 a.m., $10
222 Club
222 Hyde St, SF
(415) 440-0222
Diablo Cody is fucking punk rock
She used to write for alt-weekly newspapers. She worked as a stripper. She wrote a well-received memoir. Oh yeah, she won an Oscar, too. Then, when she was offered a pair of million-dollar shoes to wear to the Oscars, she told the maker, Stuart Weitzman, to go shove them up his ass.
I’ve always loved watching aging Midwest punk and hardcore kids make good, like those who went on to become nonprofit administrators, nurses, defense lawyers, journalists and screenwriters, quietly nurturing that side of their own mind that wasn’t afraid to call bullshit.
Thank you, Diablo Cody. This could only get better if the one-time Minneapolis resident started name-dropping Hammerhead, Holding On, Harvest, Profane Existence and AmRep Records in interviews. Yeah, yeah. Bob Mould and the Jayhawks, too.
Noise Pop: Fuck yeah
Most articles and reviews about Holy Fuck begin with some comment about whether the band’s music did or did not make the writer exclaim, "Holy fuck!" So insert your own exclamatory joke about the group’s name here, and let’s move past the moniker and go on to the music.
Holy Fuck straddle the rock and electronic divide: they mash together techno beats, dirty lo-fi electronics, and loud kinetic-rock rhythms. It’s a perfect of-the-moment sound — the type that indie rock kids love to dance to, balanced with enough chaotic experimentalism to appeal to noise rock and electronic fans. We live in weird times, and this band gets the times.
Perversely, as bad as the war and the economy are, kids are having a great deal of innocent fun these days. You can catch a sweaty, spazzy groove to the not-so-faux-naïf, party-starting sounds of Video Hippos. Or you can bang your head to Holy Fuck’s embodiment of that dance-party spirit.
The songs on their latest record, LP (XL), drive forward kraut rock–style, but the dirty layers of electronic noise on top of their propulsive rhythms have a purer rock vibe: they’re raw, primitive, and energetic. On my MP3 player, "Choppers," the last track on LP, fits snugly up against my next loaded disc, a Can anthology. The sound of Holy Fuck’s recorded output lies somewhere between Trans Am and Suicide, although they don’t stake out the confrontationally icy ground of the latter nor cloak themselves in the distancing self-awareness of the former. Instead, onstage a few weeks ago at the Great American Music Hall, Holy Fuck bopped around unselfconsciously, with quick-change mixes, effects-pedal tweaks, and keyboard jams. It’s a friendly, accessible show, performed by a band dedicated to making electronic music without laptops or sequencers. In fact, not only will you not find a laptop on Holy Fuck’s stage, but you’ll also discover instruments that come with a junkyard aesthetic: film modulators, and a Casio mouth organ.
The group has emerged from a Toronto scene with a vast and supportive music community, one that embraces many genres and in which most performers have more than one musical project going. Although Holy Fuck don’t want to be perceived, as the group’s Brian Borcherdt puts it over the phone, as "hippie lovefest" musicians, their writing process has been somewhat loose, improvisatory, and collaborative. The band has also included a rotating cast of Toronto musicians, which has led some to dub the ensemble an "evil supergroup," Borcherdt says. Still, regardless of what they play and whom they play with, Holy Fuck remain an exciting live band — though I’m still not going to use the easy exclamatory.
HOLY FUCK
With A Place to Bury Strangers, White Denim, and Veil Veil Varnish
Feb. 29, 9 p.m., $10
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
(415) 621-4455
Noise Pop: Little twin stars
› kimberly@sfbg.com
So are they or aren’t they? A pop twosome that make lovely music together in more ways than one is the irresistible scenario embedded in more rock, soul, and country partnerships than one can count — who doesn’t fall for the notion of torturously entangled C&W soulmates that extends far beyond Walk the Line turf and into the year in and year out of George Jones and Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner, Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty, Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons territory? Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood’s affections remained unrequited up to the latter’s 2007 death, as did the palpable chemistry between Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell.
Well, gawkers remain out of luck here, says Matt Ward, a.k.a. M. Ward, the manly half of indie rock’s latest sweetheart duo, She and Him. He and actress-singer-songwriter Zooey Deschanel are just friends, friend. "People are always going to think whatever they’re going to want to think, no matter what they read in interviews or what the facts are," the extremely soft-spoken Ward says from Omaha, Neb., where he’s currently mixing his next LP, with Bright Eyes’ Mike Logan. "I think music is a lightning rod for people’s imaginations — and I don’t think that’s a bad thing."
He can hardly expect a listener to stop dreaming while listening to the Deschanel originals. With Ward’s production and arranging input, the tunes take on the luscious feel of gimlet-eyed ’60s-style girl-group protorock ("I Was Made for You"), pedal-steel-sugared, chiming country ("Change Is Hard"), and subtly colored girl-singer pop ("I Thought I Saw Your Face Today"). Leslie Gore, Darlene Love, Julie London, Ronnie Spector, and all of those other dulcet voices of teen agony, ecstasy, and crash-and-burn romantic disaster, move over: Deschanel is the next worthy addition to those ranks — a doll-like upstart cross between Sinatra and Carole King — thanks to She and Him’s maiden outing, Volume One (Merge).
Director Martin Hynes brought Deschanel and Ward together to cover a Richard and Linda Thompson tune for his as-yet-unreleased film The Go-Getter. Deschanel and Ward discovered they were "mutually fans of each other’s work," the latter says. One song led to another and, he adds, "eventually Zooey mentioned she had some demo songs that she had under her hat. I had no idea she was a songwriter — let alone a really incredible songwriter and vocalist. They had really beautiful chord progressions, and as a producer, it makes things easy when you have great songs and amazing vocals." He decided to play Phil Spector to her King.
"We started with a pile of songs that I had written," Deschanel e-mails from her current movie, "and had found their life up to that point completely in the safety of my bedroom. It was amazing to see what such a creative individual as Matt could bring to those songs. He brought a tremendous amount of life to them without killing their original essence. His instincts are dead on."
Deschanel wasn’t above making the bizarre instrumental contribution: the mysterious bazookalike sound on "This Is Not a Test," for instance, "is actually me playing mouth trumpet," she writes. "I said, ‘This song needs a trumpet,’ and then I said, ‘You know, like this’ and I did that bit. Matt liked it. We didn’t have the budget for horns so I just did it."
They took each song as its own "island," as Deschanel puts it. "The compositions tell you where they want to go," adds Ward, who strived for a warm analog production. "We tried keeping it away from computers and digital technology as much as we could. I think that’s the main reason the record sounds good — that and the songs are good."
The approach perfectly jibed with Deschanel’s aesthetic. "I have always been attracted to old music. I have always been a fan but I continue to discover ‘new’ old music," writes the vocalist, who says she started writing at age eight, was in bands in high school, and later had a cabaret act called the Pretty Babies. Elf (2003) gave her a chance to sing on film, but otherwise she had limited her music primarily to demos: "Demoing became sort of a hobby that I found relaxing."
She isn’t concerned with trying to please hipsters or cool kids who might view her as a movie-star dilettante simply passing through the trenches of indie pop. "I hope each person responds to [Volume One] naturally without any agenda of mine seeping into the matter," she offers. "Ideally audience and artist should be uncorrupted by each other."
Not a surprise from a singer in love with the passion and craft of country music. "I think," Deschanel opines, "sincerity is hugely underrated."
SHE AND HIM
With Whispertown2000, Adam Stephens, and Emily Jane White
March 2, 8 p.m., sold out
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
(415) 885-0750
Noise Pop: Follow those Dodos
› kimberly@sfbg.com
Meric Long spent a year in chicken heaven or hell, depending on your feelings about charred fowl flesh. For about a year the Dodos vocalist-guitarist-trombonist chopped, baked, and tended as many as 80 signature roasted chickens per night as a line cook at San Francisco foodie institution Zuni Cafe — a day job so intense that plump, juicy birds haunted his dreams. "Whenever I start talking about the chickens, I can’t shut up," he says ruefully now. "It just it ruled my life for a year!"
But honestly, despite those incursions into his REM-scape, Long feels more kinship with his band’s namesake: the Dodo, that incredible, edible, yet now extinct white meat. "They were like chickens," he muses, sprawled sideways on a bench in Mission Creek Cafe on this warm California winter afternoon. The precision roasting of fowl seems far away on this fair day. "They were lonely, though."
"They wanted friends," drummer Logan Kroeber throws in. He’s still shaken and a bit stirred thanks to a too-close-to-personal-extinction-for-comfort encounter between his skateboarding self and a car blasting down a nearby alley.
"And that’s why they got killed off," Long continues. "They weren’t used to visitors, and the English came and were hungry and ate ’em."
Still, it takes a lot of sly chutzpah to adopt the moniker of the highly uncool, not-so-beautiful loser of the animal kingdom. And though they’d never say so explicitly, Long and Kroeber are hoping, humbly, to do the clumsy waddlers proud by adapting and maybe even flourishing. Exhibit one: the Dodos’ compelling second album, Visiter, scheduled to be released March 18 on Frenchkiss. Its 14 songs unfold in three rough parts, beginning with the toy piano invocations of road-weary, lovelorn musicians ("Red and Purple"), then rolling through noise-wracked folk drone ("Joe’s Waltz"), wry, Magnetic Fields–style songcraft ("Winter"), and a ragtag country blues scented with the sun and sand of Led Zeppelin and West African drumming ("Paint the Rust"). A significant evolution from Long’s time as a solo acoustic act and from the Dodos’ self-released debut, Beware of the Maniacs (2006), Visiter is startlingly deep and likely to hold up under repeated plays, catching the listener on the tenterhooks of Long’s insinuating melodies.
So it’s funny, then, to think that Long first dubbed his solo folk act Dodobird because he felt like such a slow goer and has now firmly found his voice with Kroeber and the Dodos. "To be honest, I think back then I used to have a fear that I was kind of unintelligent, like I was really dumb but didn’t know it," Long says bashfully. "I don’t know if I should say it. But I think it had to do with partying too much when I was younger and completely fucking my brain. I also think there’s this plane of understanding that other people seem to be on and I’m still kind of out of the loop on."
As usual, Kroeber jumps into the conversation, to watch his bud’s back, because seriously, dude, in his opinion, Long is nothing like the dazed and confused kids he grew up with down south: "A lot of people can sort of deflect that with ‘You’re thinking too much, man! Keep it simple! Positive vibes!’ You know, that sort of brick-by-brick, build your weed cabin." Kroeber nods sagely. "I grew up in Santa Cruz — it’s a historical place for weed-cabin building."
The Dodos found their endearingly clumsy footing far from the happy yet isoutf8g metaphorical grassy isles of yesteryear. After moving from his hometown of Lafayette, Long had been playing solo around town — occasionally as Mix Tape with vocalist Brigid Dawson of the Ohsees — when Kroeber’s cousin introduced the guitarist to the drummer two years ago. Kroeber started accompanying Long live on a few songs, on a single tom. "Even during those early shows," Kroeber recalls, "that girl Emily from Vervein was still, like, ‘It’s cool — I like what you’re doing, the one drum thing. I’m all about it!’ Even with one drum, people were, like, ‘Keep going!’<0x2009>"
A particularly inspiring Animal Collective show roused Long to offer to pay Kroeber’s way to Portland, Ore., where the singer-songwriter was about to record Beware with engineer John Askew, who owns the Filmguerrero label. Their experience working with Askew was so fruitful that the two returned to Askew’s Type Foundry studio to make Visiter after spending 2006 on perpetual tour, getting tighter, writing songs together, and solidifying their identity as a band. For Visiter, the duo piled on an odd array of instruments — stand-up bass, toy piano, and trombone — while the producer carefully pieced the sounds together in the recording’s aural landscape. "John sits there and closes his eyes and imagines his record as a soundscape and places things geographically," Long says, standing suddenly and patting the air above him here and there. "I think it really helped with this situation, because with two people there’s a lot of sonic space to fill, so where he placed everything really made a huge difference. The drums take up so much sound space on the record."
Loneliness fills the spaces of the songs as well, as Visiter so often seems to revolve around the women who were just passing through Long’s life. "Jodi" and "Ashley" are, naturally, about two such suspects, while "Undeclared" eschews Kanye West collegiate themes to focus on an unrealized crush, and "Red and Purple" captures that "young lady" who fashioned elaborate gifts involving invisible ink that would greet Long at every club on tour. "It was pretty romantic shit," Long says a bit wistfully.
"I was definitely impressed," Kroeber agrees. "I didn’t really know this girl, but later I imagined she was one of those people who sew everything by hand, supermeticulous. It was some next-level spy shit."
As the talk turns to girls who have come and gone, the Dodos grow a mite melancholy, though not enough to throw in the towel and jump in a roasting pan. They recently underwent a minimedia storm in New York City, where they attempted to go uncensored for MTV.com while hungover and sleep deprived after partying with Long’s chef pals the previous night. Fortunately, these days the Dodos are relying on their survival instinct more often than not and seeking out swimming holes rather than new watering holes when on tour.
Not that the drink doesn’t have its uses. "It’s an artificial sort of cryostasis," Kroeber quips. "But as soon as you get done with the tour and go home, it crumbles. The second tour, when I came back, my girlfriend was, like, ‘What the fuck happened to you?’ But it does work! When you’re on the road it’s the one thing that keeps you going."
THE DODOS
With Or, the Whale, Bodies of Water, and Willow Willow
Feb. 28, 9 p.m., $10–$12
Cafe du Nord
2170 Market, SF
(415) 861-5016
ww.cafedunord.com
Going solo
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
Regarding the recent column on women who can’t have orgasms [1/30/08]: I hate to say it, but it looks like you phoned this one in. Where are the partners in the equation? If you were the boyfriend, wouldn’t it seem rude for your girlfriend to say, "I’m going to put you on hold while I play with toys to feel better sexually"? I think it would be better for her to say, "We need to talk," then describe what’s going on with her sexual responses and feelings. Why shut him out? That doesn’t help the relationship. They can figure it out together; maybe it can even be a playful exercise in experimentation. If he can’t deal, then he wasn’t the right boyfriend for her anyway.
I really do enjoy your column.
Love,
All about the Teamwork
Dear Team:
Hey, that’s OK. I really do enjoy your feedback. I actually didn’t phone this one in, though. I told the young women to put their boyfriends on hold for a while because partnered sex was not working for them. And desperately trying to have a good time works about as well in bed as it does out on the town on New Year’s Eve, which is to say, not at all. If I neglected to tell the young women that they ought to at least notify the boyfriends that they would be checking out for a bit to do some exploration on their own, well, that was sloppy, and I do apologize. (Girls, tell your boyfriends why you’re not having sex for a while, OK?) But I stand by my original suggestion that they should, indeed, skip the partnered sex in favor of masturbation until they can at least say with some conviction that they know what an orgasm feels like.
I said in the original column that it isn’t fair, but women often get out of touch with their sexual responses in a way that’s pretty rare for men. And although women certainly have no lock on extreme self-consciousness, what gets in our way is a mostly female blend of "Oh no, he’s looking at me and he’ll see I don’t look like [insert current icon here]" and "Oh no, I’m taking too long. What if he thinks I’m selfish or gets bored?" plus fear of losing self-control and looking slutty. And sometimes the only way to ditch all of that stuff is to run away alone.
I also mentioned Lonnie Barbach and Betty Dodson but somehow forget to include Julia Heiman and Joseph LoPiccolo, whose Becoming Orgasmic (Prentice Hall, 1976) has been around since the ’70s and originated some of the ideas I toss around as though they were obvious, which I realize they are not. Heiman and LoPiccolo do not begin their program with "tell your partner what you like" or "masturbate in front of him" or any of the other fairly advanced techniques that sex experts throw at women who are having trouble with orgasms (I’m sorry, I’m enough of a geek that I can’t see that phrase without thinking, immediately but unhelpfully, of tribbles). Instead, it starts way back, with examining your history and your ideas about sexuality before you even get close to literal physical examination — and when you do get there, you get there alone. (For those who prefer their sex help with early ’90s hair, there is a video version, also called Becoming Orgasmic [Sinclair Institute, 1993], which you can order online.)
The idea of solo exploration before allowing the partner back into the bedroom reminds me of something else (besides tribbles, that is), and now I realize what it is. It’s all very similar to the late, lamented (he seemed like a nice guy, and he sure wrote a useful book) therapist Bernie Zilbergeld’s well-known program for overcoming premature ejaculation in his (please forgive me) seminal book The New Male Sexuality (Bantam, 1984), which was rooted in the work of Masters and Johnson. You start slowly, with guided imagery and masturbation, and not even particularly fun masturbation. Gradually, over weeks or months, you add partnered activities. The program works much better for men in stable partnerships, but that doesn’t mean the partner is involved every step of the way.
So no, I didn’t mean to imply that the anorgasmic girls’ club ought to nail up a permanent "No boyz allowed" sign, and of course I think it would be silly and almost certainly destructive to embark on such a program without fully informing any partners first. But if the problem is compounded of various parts self-consciousness, bad messages, fear of judgment, and just plain fear, then no, I don’t think taking one’s very first, faltering steps toward sexual self-confidence in front of an audience is necessarily the best idea.
Love,
Andrea
Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.
MyZombieSpace
› cheryl@sfbg.com
George A. Romero’s new movie, Diary of the Dead, isn’t really by Romero. It’s not even called Diary of the Dead. It’s actually called The Death of Death, and it’s by ambitious student filmmaker Jason (Joshua Close), who happens to already be shooting a horror movie when zombie o’ clock rolls around. At least that’s the conceit of Diary, a supposedly self-filmed tale that was completed long before Cloverfield stomped its way across New York City but will no doubt be seen as hooking onto that film’s monster success.
Jason and his film-school buddies — including his take-charge girlfriend, Debra (Michelle Morgan) — first learn about the zombie outbreak from a radio broadcast. As the film progresses (it’s a road movie, with much chugging down rural routes in a Winnebago), the kids remain connected to the outside world via television and, more important, the Internet, portrayed as the only reliable information source as chaos takes over and cell phones go dead.
While there are some juicy zombie scenes and a few crowd-pleasing moments (nobody who sees Diary will forget the Amish guy), the film is less concerned with glorious gore than, say, the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake. Romero is known for making horror films "with an underlying thread of social satire" (just like Diary protagonist Jason), but here the thread is laid completely bare. Debra’s somber voice-over tends to overexplain, uh, everything; as in Cloverfield, none of the characters are particularly interesting or sympathetic, and the device of having the camera be part of the story rapidly becomes annoying.
Still, you gotta give the director props for his message, no matter how obviously he states it. Most horror films that try to make a statement stop at a vague pronouncement about the world being fucked. Romero’s smart enough to zero in on a particular problem — Internet-age information overload! — and incorporate it in a story that manages to implicate the viewer at the same time. If we’re witnessing The Death of Death, are we not the intended audience that kept Jason’s hand firmly on the record button even as his friends died around him?
DIARY OF THE DEAD
Opens Fri/15 in Bay Area theaters
Buddy movie
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
Recently I shared a hotel room with a buddy on a trip and we masturbated together (for the first time). His cock was bigger than mine, and he had an incredibly big come shot. I am not attracted to men — we are both married — but I was very aroused by seeing this. After the awkward silence, I commented on the volume of his load, which led to a conversation about how he gets no sex and never receives a blow job because his wife is grossed out by come. After an hour-long discussion on the pros and cons of cocksucking, we exchanged oral sex (it was the first time for this too). This was about two weeks ago. So finally, here are my questions: Is this unusual among hetero men? My justifications for my actions are that it’s safe sex and just a mutual favor between buddies, not cheating per se. Am I delusional? Can someone else taste come in one’s mouth after oral sex? It seemed like I could taste it for a long time afterward, even once I rinsed.
Love,
Buddy-Buddy
Dear Bud:
Yeah, OK, I’m going to answer this out of nostalgia — it’s been some years since I was free to give sex info over the phone at San Francisco Sex Information (www.sfsi.org), but when I did, it was during the first shift on Mondays, and I got tons of calls from you guys, the "I had completely unexpected homo sex over the weekend" people. I have to say, though, that I don’t believe this happened to you any more than I believed it happened to most of those other dudes. The big tip-off? It wasn’t the blow job; it was the use of the word buddy. Who says that? I IM’d my own best buddy this question: "Under what circs could you imagine yourself referring to a male friend as a ‘buddy’?" And after he recovered from the shock, he offered, "If we were in a bowling league together?" which made me laugh, but you know, I still don’t buy it. Guys you have beers with are friends or guys you have beers with. Buddies are people you trade imaginary blow jobs with in hotel rooms that the two of you are mysteriously sharing in the unexplained absence of your wives. OK, then!
So, just for the sake of the good old days (mine, not yours), let me answer your questions.
Yes, it’s pretty unusual. The experimental hand job among teenage boys may be common, but straight married guys do not customarily go down on each other just as soon as they’re done raiding the minibar. It doesn’t happen. I’m not judging, mind you. I could not care less about random blow jobs among buddies. Harking back to the San Francisco Sex Information model, though: we were trained to normalize things by placing them on a continuum. Rather than saying "People don’t do that," or "Everyone feels that way," we use the words some, many, most. For instance, we say things like "Most people have fantasies, many people have homosexual fantasies, some people act on them in hotel rooms they are mysteriously sharing with a ‘buddy.’<0x2009>" Most guys don’t! And — keeping in mind that I don’t care about the gay angle or the blow job itself — I do disagree that it isn’t cheating. Ask your wives if it’s OK with them and you’ll see what I mean. On second thought, don’t.
It’s funny, just as I was sitting down to pull this column together a friend (specifically, one of the friends my husband regularly has a beer with and never, ever refers to as a buddy) called to tell me there was a show on advice giving on the radio, featuring the "Radical Honesty" guy (www.radicalhonesty.com), Brad Blanton. Apparently BB was perched in one studio telling the Chicago Tribune‘s Amy Dickinson, who was in another studio, that yes, those pants did make her butt look big, and bloviating on about how — and this is from his Web site — "Radical Honesty means you tell the people in your life what you’ve done or plan to do, what you think, and what you feel. It’s the kind of authentic sharing that creates the possibility of love and intimacy." Now, I am a firm believer in the occasional use of Radical Obfuscation and honestly believe Brad Blanton is probably a total tool, so obviously his philosophy is not for me. I suggest it’s not for you either. It’s far better to do something not great (the random blow job not exactly being the moral equivalent of setting fire to an orphanage), shut the hell up about it, and never do it again. Of course, if you find yourself turning from your wife’s touch and longing for your buddy’s instead — well, that’s a different problem and maybe a little radical honesty might be called for. But I think not.
And yes, the taste will linger forever. There is nothing that will loosen its foul grip upon your tongue, so you might as well get used to it.
Kidding! I think if you’d actually given a blow job instead of just fantasizing about one, you would know this, but pungent as it may be, semen is just proteinaceous glop like any other. Brush your teeth and it will go away.
Love,
Andrea
Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.
Clubs: I feel so Debaser
Yes, shake yourself, wake yourself, shiver ye timbers, and don ye olde kinderwhore frock. There’s a newish club in town, courtesy of those Neon kids: Debaser, a ’90s alternative dance party that has yet to find its firm monthly footing but will nonetheless shake the rafters at the Knockout Saturday, Feb. 9.
Tomorrow’s Valentine’s special showcases DJs Jamie Jams (Avery Island), EmDee (Club Neon), and Jessica (Club Lovely); bearer of the best Courtney Love-style baby doll dress gets a gift certificate to Thrift Town. Sorry, no lurid imagery available yet: Jams confesses that lame ole 2D pics fail to convey the “sheer mania” going down. Last month, he says, “We seriously had 300 people in flannels moshing to records and screaming all the words to the Cranberries.” Scary! But fun at the same time, no? And never fear, Breeder babies, if you miss this month’s, you can always get your Kurt on at the next party on March 1.
Debaser
Saturday, Feb. 9; 10 p.m.; free with flannel before 11 p.m., afterward $5
Knockout
3223 Mission, SF
Ballin’
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER "I get to go to the ball!"
Longtime Oakland soul hopeful Ledisi isn’t spilling the beans about what designer she’ll be wearing to the Grammy Awards on Feb. 10, but on the phone from New York City, where she’s as deep into the wardrobe as the lion and the witch, she guarantees, "I’ll be cute!"
Red-carpet frocks, on-and-off awards ceremonies, and nominations for Best R&B Album for last year’s Lost and Found (Verve Forecast) and, get this, Best New Artist ("People say I’m a new artist, and I am a new artist in this mainstream world," says the woman who put out her previous two CDs on her LeSun label. "I’ve never had third-party involvement in anything!") — it’s all high drama for Ledisi Anibade Young. Nonetheless, she knows she’ll be enjoying herself to the core and even more because she’ll be exactly where she wants to be: namely, comfortable in her own skin.
"I just feel like I’ve finally come into my own, meaning I’m OK with myself," the vocalist says, bubbling like de Brignac. "I’m still hungry, but I’m not begging anymore."
As we speak, Ledisi is floating, as she puts it, in more ways than one: she’s drifting between residences in NYC, Oakland, and Washington DC and lifting higher about the national spotlight that comes with her nominations, a recognition laid on a clutch of other once and present Bay Area artists like Keyshia Cole, Machine Head, and Turtle Island Quartet and local indie label Six Degrees (for Bebel Gilberto, Ce’U, and Spanish Harlem Orchestra). Regardless of how you feel about the continuing relevance of the Recording Academy paperweights — yes, the Best Polka Album category is still in place — the thrill a nominee like Ledisi feels is catching, especially when one considers the flights of ups and downs she’s undergone over the years.
"I didn’t think I wanted the pressure of being in the front again, with all the issues of image and the style of singing and choosing a category to be in — you know, all that kind of the pressure!" she says, recalling the times she thought about giving up performing. After her debut, Soulsinger (LeSun, 1999), won near-universal praise but garnered zero coveted R&B radio attention, she left Oakland and moved to NYC because, she says, she was "tired of going around in circles." With an understudy role in Broadway’s Caroline, or Change in her change pocket, Ledisi had begun developing the stage version of The Color Purple when she signed to Verve and dropped out of the production to work on Lost and Found.
But after working for a year and a half to get her deal, "the guy who signed me," Verve president Ryan Goldstein, was suddenly laid off among many others. She finished the record, took a breath, and went back into the studio, fearing the new powers that be would require further alterations.
Meanwhile, she adds, "I was finding myself in my personal life": she ended a long relationship and met her father. Her R&B vocalist mother had already told her that her biological father was Larry Saunders, but only when Ledisi traveled to Amsterdam and mentioned his name to a DJ there did she realize others knew The Prophet of Soul, the name of Saunders’s 1976 Soul International LP. "He said, ‘We know who he is!’ and pulled out his record," Ledisi remembers. Her parents had met on tour when Saunders was a starring performer and her mother a backup singer, and when Ledisi finally met her father, "it was just like peas in a pod. I never felt so complete. Now I don’t have those things around me going, ‘Who am I?’<0x2009>"
Ledisi also discovered that her father was the love child of blues vocalist Johnny Ace, who achieved legend as an early rock ‘n’ roll casualty, allegedly shooting himself during a Russian roulette game on Christmas Day, 1954. "When I found out," she says, "I was, like, ‘No wonder we’re all singers!’<0x2009>"
"You know this record is really powerful, with all this happening during its process," she says of Lost and Found, which eventually debuted at number 10 on Billboard‘s R&B chart. "I tell you, with all the stuff that went on, it’s all worth it. Win or lose, I’m just so complete. I just want to stay in the moment — couldn’t ask for a better moment to happen."
WALKING PNEUMONIA, HERE WE COME
THE EVERYBODYFIELDS
Everything’s OK with these tenderhearted crust-country kids. With I See Hawks in LA. Wed/6, 8 p.m., $12. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com
PIERCED ARROWS
Dead Moon rising: "Walking Wounded" vets Fred and Toody Cole keep flying that lo-fi flag. With Black Lips. Fri/8, 9 p.m., $15. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com
TERRIBLE TWOS
Motor City kiddies trade in snot-laced cacophony. With Top Ten and Wylde Youth. Sat/9, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
PALEO
Gimmick or gimme-gimme? Brooklyn’s David Strackany followed in the footsteps of Suzan-Lori Parks with his "Song Diary" project: 365 songs, one written and recorded each day for a year. But his next trick after that media blitz? With the Blank Tapes and Eddy Burke. Sun/10, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
MERLE HAGGARD
NorCal’s country music giant reaches east with 2007’s The Bluegrass Sessions (McCoury/Hag) — see where it takes him. Mon/11, 8 p.m., $65. Grand at the Regency Center, 1290 Sutter, SF. www.ticketmaster.com
LOS AMIGOS INVISIBLES
The very newest sounds from the Venezuelans of disco derring-do? With Si*Se and DJ Franky Boissy. Mon/11–Tues/12, 8 p.m., $22. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com