sex

SFIFF, day one: The world according to Asia

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By Jeffrey M. Anderson

This year, it’s Asia Argento‘s festival, and we’re all just invited. I’ve heard through the grapevine that Asia will not be in attendance at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, but her diva-ness will exude throughout. She’s in no less than three festival films this year, a feat I can’t remember ever having been duplicated (if you were quick enough, a fourth one, Boarding Gate, recently opened and closed in San Francisco).

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Asia Argento picnics in The Last Mistress

Asia has always struck me as an unholy fusion of Uma Thurman and Rachel Weisz, but far more daring and alluring. In her father Dario Argento‘s Mother of Tears, she looks unbearably sexy striding through the streets of Rome in a black raincoat. A raincoat! She’s not so much an actress as she is a force of nature; she explodes rather than performs. None of her films can be categorized as trifling, bland or boring, and she sets the bar for guts at this year’s festival. Among the rest of this year’s films one can find elements of psychotronic cinema: dangerous marginal ideas like time-travel, ghosts, murder, martial arts, gore and sex. This is no shoe-gazing, hand-wringing fest. We’ve got some of the strangest films since Harmony Korine’s Gummo turned up in 1998.

Events kick off tonight with Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress — starring Asia — and the big opening night party. I’ll talk more about the film tomorrow. After that, I’ll do my best to prowl around the festival front lines, and report back on what I see. I’ll be here every day, unless I somehow fry my retinal nerves in the meantime…

Five random early picks: Bela Tarr’s The Man from London, Peter Chan’s The Warlords, Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life, Alexander Sokurov’s Alexandra and Craig Baldwin’s Mock Up on Mu.

“Fox in the Mirror”

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REVIEW When artists speak of found objects, they sometimes mean found — in a marketing plan. But Liliana Porter is different. The Argentine artist is the real thing, hopelessly devoted to convincing us that something is missing, not from her impeccable arrangements of miniatures and figurines — or the potent, often-hilarious feelings they invoke — but from our too serious attitudes toward the private parts of our lives.

Porter’s 2007 video Fox in the Mirror, presented in a show of the same name at the Hosfelt Gallery, reveals the artist to be a sculptural Gertrude Stein. Stein gave language body — undressed it, laughed at it, cried for it, and cuddled it. Porter does the same with Fox, manipuutf8g small, signature objects to Sylvia Meyer’s arresting musical score, which varies from lush tangos to symphonic yet anticlimactic movie-trailer music. "Oriental" pentatonic melodies are thrown in ironically to match Porter’s musical and military Chinese figurines.

The video begins with a series of vignettes more powerful than the following narrative sequence, which is eerily conducted by a well-dressed fox. They sparkle with sex and sadness as a white candle resembling a man and woman dancing in formal wear spins into tears, a bright yellow chick encounters an emotional storm, and a duo of Mao wristwatches move one tick forward and a lifetime of ticks back to Meyer’s electro remix of a song from The Sound of Music (1965). Sketches named after types of punctuation stimulate feelings of expectation as a turbaned musician seems about to swallow a bird alive. Javier Marias wrote that the present is a curse because "it allows us to see and appreciate almost nothing." He has a point, but the beauty of the statement outweighs the sadness of its meaning. The same could be said about Porter’s transcendent art.

LILIANA PORTER: FOX IN THE MIRROR Through May 3. Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Hosfelt Gallery, 430 Clementina, SF. Free. (415) 495-5454, www.hosfeltgallery.com

SFIFF: Explosive stuff!

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

SFIFF The pop detritus of today is the archaeological evidence of tomorrow, to be pieced together by future generations — should there be any — who will no doubt want to know what the hell we were thinking. Their conclusions may be bizarre. But will their conjecture be any stranger than our present-tense realities?

Inventing tomorrow’s conspiracy theories today is Mock Up on Mu, the latest pseudodocumentary, sci-fi historical dig, Situationist prank, and thinly veiled fight-the-power rant by San Francisco’s collage king, Craig Baldwin. In the mode of his prior cult faves Tribulation 99 (1992), O No Coronado! (1992) and Spectres of the Spectrum (1999) — albeit with a higher percentage of new staged sequences mixed into the ingeniously assembled archival errata — it again grinds fact and fiction into a tasty genre-defying pulp. For many, Mu‘s world premiere is the most eagerly awaited event in the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival’s goody-laden schedule.

It’s 2019 AD on the Empire of Mu — the Moon — where L. Ron Hubbard (Damon Packard) is building theme parks, selling crater-naming rights, and beaming corporate logos back to "that prison planet called Earth." Having been banished from our planet, he must dispatch "Agent C," a.k.a. Marjorie Cameron (Michelle Silva), back to the blue ball to engage in some espionage involving the seductions of both Ra-worshiping rocket scientist Jack Parsons (Kal Spelletich) and sleazy defense contractor Lockheed Martin (Stoney Burke). Realizing "Commodore" Hubbard’s purposes may be more nefarious than professed, she finds the truth is out there … way out there. It’s naked and shameless, in fact. Those hippies were right: free love will save us all.

As ever, there is a certain investigative method behind the Oakland-born Baldwin’s jigsaw madness. The real Parsons was the founder of the pre-NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an avid occultist. He started a private boat dealership with none other than Hubbard, before Hubbard absconded with some money and Parsons’ girlfriend (whom he married). Soon thereafter, Hubbard wrote the original Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health in 1950, which in turn led to that gift to mankind we call Scientology. As for Parsons, he went on to marry painter, author, and psychic Cameron, who, like him (as well as Hubbard) was an early American devotee of Aleister Crowley and a participant in sex magick rituals.

Thus you don’t need six degrees, let alone Kevin Bacon, to connect Wernher von Braun, Kenneth Anger, and Tom Cruise. History is fun! As is Mu, with its antic use of everything from old propagandistic footage to clips spanning eras of cinematic sci-fi: Georges Melies’ 1902 Trip to the Moon, the original Flash Gordon serial and 1936’s H.G. Wells–based Things to Come, drive-in trash (it’s always cheering to see 1962’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die), and Star Trek. The resulting fair-use frolic nonetheless reveals a serious side or three while exploring the dense and slightly demented history of military and aerospace business in sunny California.

Baldwin recently took a break from his numerous other roles — programmer at Other Cinema; teacher at SF Art Institute, California College of the Arts, and Artists Television Access — to sound off on Mu.

SFBG I hate to ask such a blunt question, but what is this movie about?

CRAIG BALDWIN My "Mu-vie" is about how utopian visions of technology and space exploration became compromised by the military in the late 20th century. And [about] how the lives of [technological and space travel] pioneers afford a rich trace of California regional history after World War II: the complex crossing of alternative tech research, personal belief systems, lifestyles, artistic practices, newly organized and newly imported religions, and spiritual institutions. Plus that era brought an explosion of the formerly marginalized sci-fi genre, of which Mu is of course the very latest iteration!

Mu is also about the cult of film, especially experimental film. I’m trying to work though a new model of historiography or storytelling that I am calling collage-narrative. It’s a humble stab at opening up a new space in film practice that is not only of interest to historians but also to aesthetes. And, my dear, I don’t have to tell you that these groups are certainly not mutually exclusive!

SFBG Your father worked for a rocket manufacturer. Has that made you more interested in Cold War and military-industrial complex themes?

CB Yes, my dad worked for Aerojet. He was born the same year as Parsons! And I was born the year Parsons died. I am his reincarnation. But the point is something like 30 percent of Californians were involved in the aerospace biz at its height.

SFBG How much real Scientology material is in Mu?

CB [The film] remains at the level of Swiftian allegory or satire, spinning off of their Genesis story and [acting as] a meta-gloss on Hubbard’s own autobiography.

SFBG I wish Unarius had become the growth religious cult of our time. They’ve certainly made better movies. But regarding yours, the real life connections between Parsons, Hubbard, Crowley, "Mother of the New Age movement" Cameron, occultism, and scientific and military work are stranger than fiction.

CB Everyone has been very influenced by the New Age, uh, belief systems. But more than anything, I identify with postwar bohemians, beats, and hippies. Those days when rocket scientists and sci-fi pulpmeisters and occult conjurers and proto-Wicca ritual carnal orgiastic pagans intermingled may be long gone — though Kenneth Anger is still around.

SFBG Mu uses a lot of excerpts from mainstream and low budget entertainment. But where does the less familiar material — educational, promotional, and so forth — come from? You must spend infinite hours looking for the perfect clip.

CB It comes from my usual source: My basement archive of 2,500 industrial films. I do spend time in there, but could hardly claim to find the perfect clip. Au contraire. I call it "availabilism" — making what I do have work for me, through editing and audio techniques, overwriting it all into an associational stew hopefully akin to the half-memory, half-fantasy, sublinguistic colloid of thought itself.

SFBG What reaction does your work get from students? They presumably grok the pop culture stuff, but do they get the political undercurrents?

CB People can be responsive to the pop-cult clips, or the regional history, or the antiwar sentiments. But methinks [Mock Up on Mu] will be a touchstone for legions of occult or subcult partisans ravenous for these almost mythic tales of the roots of alternative religions.

SFBG Sir, your Thetan level must be off the charts.

MOCK UP ON MU Mon/28, 9:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki; April 30, 8:55 p.m., Pacific Film Archive


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

Let it go

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I broke up with my boyfriend when he moved to another city after a short but intense relationship. Since then, we’ve visited each other regularly and continued having a sexual relationship. I’ve been fancying/dating/shagging other people for basically the whole time. But now he’s started expressing interest in another girl and I’m jealous, though I’m trying not to let him know.

I don’t want to get back together. Apart from the long-distance factor, every time I see him I’m reminded of all the ways in which we are incompatible. The sex is good, but not the best ever. Still, I spend a lot of time missing him, thinking about him, and feeling resentful of this new woman! Why can’t I let go of this?

Love,

Pouting

Dear Pout:

Oh, who knows. I think we’re just mammals and once we’ve marked something or someone with our (insert yucky metaphor here), that something must forever remain at least partly ours. Yesterday my daughter claimed an empty kefir bottle and carried it around with her for hours, reclaiming it this morning the minute she saw it in the recycling. OK, she’s a toddler, but I don’t know how much we ever mature past the "Mine! You can’t have it!" stage.

It’s hard to let go, even when what you’re hanging on to is entirely unsuitable. You don’t really want that empty yogurt jug; you just don’t want anyone else to claim it. But someone will, and you’ll be fine. In other words, it’s not that you can’t let go, it’s just that you haven’t yet.

It should be obvious that the best way to get you past this in a hurry is to stop seeing the guy. You don’t really want to be this dude’s booty call, do you? And he doesn’t seem like such a great pick to be your booty call, since he’s only pretty good at the only thing you’re likely to be doing together. It would be different if you were, say, an aspiring singer and he were the only accompanist who understands … oh, never mind. This story is going nowhere, just like what’s left of your relationship with Visit Guy. You miss him because you see him. And you resent the new girl because she’s taking some of what you’ve got left. Give her the whole thing. You don’t need it.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I am confused by my thoughts. I fantasize constantly about my wife having sex with other men. She’s refused, so I quit asking her about it. But now I can’t sleep. I am 36 with three children, and am having three or four wet dreams a week about my wife having sex with other men. Most of the time the men don’t even have faces — it’s just me watching my wife have sex. I love my wife very much and wonder why I have this fantasy.

Love,

Sleepless

Dear Sleepy:
Nobody knows why, so don’t look at me. I mean it — nobody knows why anybody fantasizes about or fixates on anything. It’s not just that nobody knows why you, the guy who wrote Andrea a letter, fixates on seeing his wife have sex with another guy. It may help to know that you have a great deal of company; indeed, accessing a little porn on the theme may help take some pressure off. Your search terms are probably "cuckold" (now that‘s a word with some years under its belt) and "hot wife" (although there’s also "troilism" and "candaulism" if you want to get technical). If you do not want to see or read some porn, I suggest you never, under any circumstances, Google any of those terms. Even "wife" alone will get you some things you’d probably never want to tell your spouse that you’ve seen — especially since you’ve asked her, been turned down, and she’d probably prefer not to have that particular discussion again.

While I was waiting for the coffee to kick in this morning and trying to force my brain to cough up the term "troilism" for you, I did a little search myself and found this quite nice article on Nerve that goes into great detail about the culture that has grown up around cuckolding-the-fetish — which is not the sort of thing that could have flourished in the pre-Internet age but has certainly come into its own. And aren’t we proud?

Actually, I have no problem with it, provided it isn’t one of those situations where the man (usually) begs and whines and cajoles and bothers the woman (usually) past the point where it makes sense to do so. Either she won’t change her mind or she’ll agree to it, meet someone else, and leave the first guy. Either way is OK with me. But neither of these things applies in your case. You’re OK. If you can’t sleep, try exercise, melatonin, or masturbation.
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.

Found objects

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REVIEW When artists speak of found objects, they sometimes mean found — in a marketing plan. But Liliana Porter is different. The Argentine artist is the real thing, hopelessly devoted to convincing us that something is missing, not from her impeccable arrangements of miniatures and figurines — or the potent, often-hilarious feelings they invoke — but from our too serious attitudes toward the private parts of our lives.

Porter’s 2007 video Fox in the Mirror, presented in a show of the same name at the Hosfelt Gallery, reveals the artist to be a sculptural Gertrude Stein. Stein gave language body — undressed it, laughed at it, cried for it, and cuddled it. Porter does the same with Fox, manipuutf8g small, signature objects to Sylvia Meyer’s arresting musical score, which varies from lush tangos to symphonic yet anticlimactic movie-trailer music. "Oriental" pentatonic melodies are thrown in ironically to match Porter’s musical and military Chinese figurines.

The video begins with a series of vignettes more powerful than the following narrative sequence, which is eerily conducted by a well-dressed fox. They sparkle with sex and sadness as a white candle resembling a man and woman dancing in formal wear spins into tears, a bright yellow chick encounters an emotional storm, and a duo of Mao wristwatches move one tick forward and a lifetime of ticks back to Meyer’s electro remix of a song from The Sound of Music (1965). Sketches named after types of punctuation stimulate feelings of expectation as a turbaned musician seems about to swallow a bird alive. Javier Marias wrote that the present is a curse because "it allows us to see and appreciate almost nothing." He has a point, but the beauty of the statement outweighs the sadness of its meaning. The same could be said about Porter’s transcendent art.

LILIANA PORTER: FOX IN THE MIRROR Through May 3. Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Hosfelt Gallery, 430 Clementina, SF. Free. (415) 495-5454, www.hosfeltgallery.com

Violet Blue vs. Violet Blue

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By Justin Juul

I totally got hoodwinked.

Two years ago, I bought expensive tickets to the 2006 Exotic Erotic Expo because the flyer for the event advertised a live appearance by Violet Blue, who is one of my favorite sex writers, and who I’d wanted to meet for a very long time. I never got to meet her though. Turns out there’s a porn star also named Violet Blue, and she was the one appearing. So, instead of schmoozing with a journalist, I spent my time at the expo drinking cheap beer and stalking a porn star. Snore.

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The real Violet Blue

Naturally Violet Blue the writer is pretty pissed about this kind of mix up — she claims the fake Violet Blue is using her name to attract a bigger following — and the name feud has finally made it to the courthouse. (Full disclosure: I’m a witness for the writer’s side – my story was a direct catalyst for the suit.) It seems after our missed encounter, the real Violet Blue decided she’d had enough and started looking into patent laws and ways to challenge the star of Who Violet Blew, Planet of the Gapes 4, and Beauty and the Bitch. The initial court proceedings went down last October, but the case is far from over. The porn star has been quite successful under her moniker – winning multiple AVN awards, getting countless roles, and even hosting her own radio show — and she doesn’t want to give the name up (she “officially” changed it to Violetta Blue, but continues to use the original name whenever she appears at events or stars in videos).

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The other Violet Blue (not posing with the author!)

What’s the big deal, you ask? Both of these women are involved in porn aren’t they?

Well, yes and no. The writer, whose real name actually is Violet Blue, has dedicated her entire life to showing the good side of the sex industry, whereas the other Violet Blue is just a plain ol’ sex worker. In her award winning blog, www.tinynibbles.com, and in her books, the real Violet Blue tries to show that an obsession with sex is totally natural and that “sex people” can be funny, smart, technologically advanced, artistically inclined, and full of unique ideas. She tours the world holding sex seminars on college campuses and even makes appearances on popular television shows to champion her conviction that any sex is good sex as long as it’s safe and consensual. She also believes that, contrary to popular belief, women like to watch pornography as much as men. Good deal.

But the issue isn’t about whether or not Violet Blue the imposter should be doing porn or whether or not she’s a good role model. The issue is that the real Violet Blue is constantly being mistaken for a so-so porn star and it’s fucking with her career. She can’t even win national awards, like Forbes’ Top 25 Web Celebs of 2007 (in which she won 25th place as the best pornstar/blogger) or get invited to conventions without someone thinking she does double anal for extra cash when her book sales are down. Not that that’s bad in itself, but come on. I’d be pretty pissed as well. Especially about Planet of the Gapes 4.

Shorts

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SPEED READING

AMERICAN PHOTO BOOTH

By Näkki Goranin

W.W. Norton

224 pages

$29.95

A character on the Bush-era TV show The Hills once suggested churches’ confessionals be turned into photo booths. That idea sums up today’s brand of American narcissism, if you’re feeling pessimistic. On the other hand, Näkki Goranin’s nostalgia-drenched collection of photo booth images — and her light US history of the machine — cures such cynicism. Goranin traces the lives of photo booth inventors and pioneers (none as famous as the Lumiere brothers or Thomas Edison), then shares hundreds of anonymous images. One looks like a real-life version of 1973’s Paper Moon. A few use the booth’s privacy for same-sex affection. Couples pull faces, narcissists pose, and one or two looks could illustrate loneliness. Everyone aims to create keepsakes, a tradition that persists in the digital age. I carry a photo booth image of the guy I love in my wallet. (Johnny Ray Huston)

TEMPEST TALES

By Walter Mosley

Black Classic Press

190 pages

$19.95

Tempest Landry is a slightly modernized, more complex, and smarter version of Langston Hughes’s ne’er-do-well sidewalk lothario Jesse B. Semple. A rogue and hustler, Tempest is also the first soul who refuses to repent at the Pearly Gates. Thus he’s sent back to Earth, along with a celestial foil, to prove his case. But if his assertion that he was predestined to have a raw deal in life proves true — if he shows that being born black in racist America forces one to place values ahead of morals — it could threaten to undo all existence. Ending eternity or going to hell for eternity — which would you choose? Tempest Tales weighs this question with an impeccable sense of pace. In dimly lit areas of modern-day Harlem, Mosley mixes a love story, an analogy for individuation, and a supernatural game of cat and mouse, throwing in a white devil for emphasis. It makes for a fun, funny, and poignant experience. (D. Scot Miller)

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

The pope isn’t coming to San Francisco. Too bad; a few of us have a few things to say.

When the last pope, John Paul II, came here in 1987, it felt kind of like a circus. The dude loved theater, and there was plenty of it to go around — he made a point, for example, of meeting with Clint Eastwood, who was then the mayor of Carmel, which gave my friend Victor Krummenacher of Camper Van Beethoven the chance to make up "Monterey Pope Festival" T-shirts. A few enterprising sorts made photos of Eastwood with a gun in his hand telling the Holy Father: "Go ahead, bless my day."

When JPII showed up at the Mission Dolores, some jokers who lived across the street hung a huge banner that read: "The pope is a wanker."

I, of course, didn’t want to miss the show.

It turned out that getting a press pass for the pope’s visit was a little tricky, especially for a reporter for an alternative newsweekly who made no secret of his disdain for the local Catholic hierarchy. But I went to Catholic school and have a good old Irish name, and I wasn’t going to let this one get away.

So I filed my application with the locals, and had it rejected. The day before the pope was due to arrive, I called the archdiocese headquarters to ask who was really in charge of papal press. After a bunch of squirming, they admitted there was a special monsignor in a downtown hotel who made the final decisions. I got his name; I called the hotel and got the suite, where his secretary told me he was seeing nobody, that the deadline had passed, and that, in the vernacular, I was SOL.

But my father taught me well: priests drink bourbon, monsignors drink Scotch. So I picked up a nice single-malt and made my way to the holy press room. I pitched a fit of sadness to the secretary (my poor sainted mother, who was praying for me even now, would be in tears if she thought I’d missed the chance to see His Holiness) and that got me through the door.

The monsignor looked up and told me there was no way anyone was getting credentials the day before the visit and he’d never heard of my newspaper anyway. I pulled out the bottle, and he smiled.

"Bless you, my son," he said. "I think we can do business."

So I got the special Pope press pass, and saw the Popemobile, and saw the big wanker banner, and had a grand old time — and other than the fact that the city tore up all the bushes along the papal route so nobody would plant bombs, the city was pretty quiet.

That would not be the case today.

The new pope isn’t just a wanker — he’s pissing off all sorts of people, including his own believers. Queer groups, women, people who believe in stem cell research, people who believe in sex education for kids, people who think that wiping out family planning and prenatal programs for third-world women to avoid even the slightest mention of abortion … they got a beef with this guy. And they’re more active than ever.

So Benedict, the former Cardinal Ratzinger, won’t make it to SF. Damn. Despite Mayor Newsom’s embarrassing hide-the-ball game, we did a pretty good job on the Olympic torch. And the pope would be too big to hide.

Man hating: the new U.S. birth control

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By Paula Connelly

A highly effective birth control shot, made specifically for men, has been developed in Australia! It has been proven to be as effective as a vasectomy but without long-term effects. Unfortunately, pharmaceutical companies are not funding efforts to make this revolutionary mode of contraception available to the public. They don’t think men will buy it, even though it has demonstrated a fraction of the side effects associated with the female birth control pill. Unsurprising considering that politics, pricing and culture have been limiting access to contraceptives in the U.S. for years, resulting in inflated teenage and unwanted pregnancy rates, according to the Male Contraception Information Project. It is insulting to all the women who have suffered the insane mood swings, nausea, weight gain, diminished sex drive, increased risk of heart attack and breast cancer to hear men being quoted in the media saying, ‘”I would rather rely on a solution that doesn’t involving medicating myself and the problems women have had with hormone therapy doesn’t make me anxious to want to sign on to taking a hormone-type therapy,” says Hardin, 40, who is single and a college administrator.’

But this is just what’s being reported.

The reality is that plenty of men will use this option, and this trend would only increase over time as male birth control methods broke through the negative, emasculating stigma. I personally know many men who would love to try a non-barrier male birth control option and I know even more women poised to convince their partners to try it. Hell, I’ll even support the ‘girl’s secretly trying to get pregnant’ argument if that gets more guys thinking outside the (ahem) box.

Q: Will the Spray Cause Erectile Dysfunction?

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A. Not if you keep looking at porn.

Yesterday’s, er, news that men (sex, sex, sex, money, money, sports) take greater risks after viewing porn, got me wondering what will happen to the stock market when the feds start spraying female moth pheromones.

imagesed.jpg

Will the market go soft? Will everyone, drag queens included, start dressing as giant female moths?
mothcostume.jpg

Will my cat start puking? And is Fodor really warning folks to stay the f*** away ?
(These latter two questions are raised in a somewhat erratic piece at the Huffington Post)

But don’t worry, Mommy, Arnie says the spray is safe.
Seriously folks, to reassure us all, the California Department of Food and Agriculture sent this transcript of the Governor speaking from Salinas.

“Hello-Today, Governor Schwarzenegger was in Salinas to continue statewide discussions on budget reform.
After his event, the local ABC station asked him about LBAM spraying. The transcript is below. Thought you may find it interesting.

ABC: Will you comment on LBAM spraying?

Governor: It’s important we do everything we can because it can destroy our agriculture products and harm our environment. Other countries can cut off our agriculture trade. Public safety is my number one priority and there is nothing that shows this program is unsafe.

ABC: Senator Migden is proposing legislation to prevent spraying before an EIR is done. Do u have a position?

Governor: We have done all the studies in the world and nothing says it is unsafe. We wouldn’t spray if it were unsafe.

ABC: You would look these people in the eye and tell them it is safe?

Governor: This is safe. The spraying is safe and there is nothing that says otherwise.

Meanwhile, folks who remain unconvinced that the spraying is safe are being urged…to catch a bus to Sacramento tomorrow, April 16.
Read on for details:

Bigger than life

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

How would you define an improbable Tilt-A-Whirl Technicolor or Vistavision or Cinemascope view of American virtue and vice? Jean-Luc Godard’s term for it was Tashlinesque. Watching the feverish films in the Pacific Film Archive’s short Frank Tashlin retrospective, we see an artist pushing the outermost limits of cinematic realism, gorging 1950s America on its desire for bigger, better, and faster.

The Tashlinesque land of excess encompasses Jayne Mansfield’s breasts, Kool Aid-red convertibles, and bubblegum teenagers. If there is a milk bottle in a Tashlin film, it will cream when a pin-up walks by. Ten-gallon hats spontaneously ejaculate oil. "The room temperature is changing, if you catch my cruder meaning," Mansfield coos in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), and we do, over and over again. Tashlin’s America is a nation of alcoholics and dupes, softheaded nincompoops and sexpot cynics. France had Jacques Tati, and we had — and have — Tashlin.

Just as it did with other stateside pulp visionaries, it took the French to recognize Tashlin’s genius. "There is not a difference in degree between Hollywood or Bust [1956] and It Happened One Night [1934]… but a difference of kind," Godard wrote in a 1957 assessment for Cahiers du Cinéma. There’s a touch of cruelty (and a trace of the director’s cartoon roots) in Tashlin’s preference for physically excessive actors like Mansfield and Jerry Lewis, though the way he uses these figures to channel the distorting nature of American gluttony and naïveté is brutally effective.

It’s not just the bodies that are inflated. The frame itself seems to be stretched over the course of these films, with camera angles and props used to accentuate the horizontality of the widescreen image. Just as Preston Sturges outdid his era of talky screwballs with dialogue-mad farces, Tashlin amplified ’50s Hollywood’s taste for grandiosity and crudeness to a pointedly unmanageable extreme. His self-aware movies give a sharp sense of the studio system in its death throes.

As satire, Tashlin’s send-ups of ad men and agents are as prescient as they are unsparing. A typical Tashlin alarm is sounded when Dean Martin’s character in Artists & Models (1955) announces at the outset that he moved to New York to make money in order to study art. In Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Tony Randall’s title character turns on the television to hear what the starlet Rita Marlowe (Mansfield) is saying to reporters on his front lawn — an apt commentary on the way technologies abstract reality and invade our privacy. The spin cycles continue to gain speed: the ’90s were an especially prime slice of the Tashlinesque, what with a booming economy, celebrity sex tapes, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Cinematically speaking, Richard Kelly just tried his hand at Tashlinesque with Southland Tales (2006), though I can’t help thinking the originator would have done better with the musical numbers.

Tashlin’s burlesque is dexterous, but it doesn’t hatch from any stable logic. Television is clearly the enemy, but the movies aren’t much better. With every bathing beauty and each overripe burst of Technicolor, the director indulges and implicates our most blithering desires. (One feels like a child reaching out for a lollipop while watching Tashlin’s films: when Godard famously quipped that there was no blood in his own 1965 Pierrot le fou but only red, he might have been quoting his American forebear.) If the plots nominally resolve themselves, the tone and visual style remain pitched between splendor and disgust.

"By exposing people to an endless stream of advertising, television taught them to take nothing at face value, to read everything ironically," Louis Menand recently wrote in the New Yorker. It was Tashlin who taught us to see this way. If there were any justice to art history, he would be in the pantheon of Pop Art, not just for his content, but also for his bold use of color and scale. But he of all people would have known that artistic success is on the same shaky ground as achievement in politics, entertainment, and business — same as it ever was.

FRANK TASHLIN: AMERICAN NONSENSE

Fri/11 through April 18

PFA Theater

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Fun but no Dice Man

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Though early paperback editions brandished a "Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture" tag, there’s never been a movie of the 1971 cult novel The Dice Man. That’s a pity, because this tale of a psychiatrist who ditches his too-orderly life — by beginning to roll dice to make decisions — is a screen natural. I bet screenwriter Daniel Taplitz has read the Luke Rhinehart (a.k.a. George Cockcroft) book. His and director Marcos Siega’s Chaos Theory is a Dice Man update, softened and family values–sweetened for our counter-counterculture age. Ryan Reynolds plays Frank, a best-selling efficiency expert whose life derails in a marital meltdown. Pulling a 180, he decides "never to make a decision again" and to rely on random index-card suggestions instead. Streaking, bar fights, extramarital sex, no-hands motorcycle riding, and other vicarious freedoms ensue. Just when it hits its giddy comic stride, Chaos Theory retreats into conventional, sentimental terrain. Still, Frank’s brief vacation from conformity might give some people ideas. (As Dice Man once did for me, when I embarked on an interstate hitchhiking trek.) And if Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) might finally reach the screen after a half-century, there’s hope for Rhinehart’s book. In fact, Paramount claims a movie version is "in development." ‘Course, they’ve been saying that for 30-plus years.

CHAOS THEORY

Opens Fri/11 at Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.chaostheorymovie.warnerbros.com

Metamorphenomenal

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Positivity — can we get some, please? Sure. Zing! Spring’s come bounding from its musty, dusty closet like a newly out Floridian, little rainbow fanny pack ablaze, itchy pink nipple rings jingling. Poor green thing! Isn’t it up to us to lead her, tripping and grinning, into the limelight fantastica? Aren’t we already there? Change, unlike Aqua Net and Paco Rabanne, is in the air. The clubs, they’ve gone azalea-crazy, bursting with neon irises and tuneful fuchsia streaks. Cocktails mysteriously grow stronger in our hands. And parties, parties everywhere — there’s far too much to do right now. Hell, my nightlife Blackberry just exploded all over my fresh electric Onitsuka Tiger shoes.

Anybody here got a Wet Ones?

"We’re spinning in the pyramid of life / As day turns to night," goes a latest wriggly dance-floor burner. "I wish the stars could shine now / For they are closer / They are near," goes another. "Let’s make out!" goes a third. Sex, stars, spinning, and you — sounds like a few times I’d love to have. How ’bout we do the bunny hop and rock our burgundy hair at the following affairs? Oh, and bring that spring girl, too. There’s always room for one more in the back.

WELCOME TO PARADISE


What do you do when you get too famous? Besides wipe up dog shit with your borrowed Chanel? How ’bout change your name and make a record? I sincerely hope you’ve made it at least once to two of the most regularly orgiastic parties in the city: Frisco Disco and Blow Up. If you have, then you’re intimately familiar with the semi-nude gymnastics, lubed-up disco-house-electro jams, and jailbait fanbase of one DJ Jefrodesiac, our fair burg’s current reigning turntable sex god.

I may just win that tiara back, though, because Jefrodesiac is dead. Metaphorically. Witness the birth of Jeffrey Paradise, his latest incarnation, who’s about to release a new EP on PrinceHouse Records and make us all update our contacts. He’ll be debuting this next evolution at Blow Up on Friday, April 11, which is also, somewhat confusingly, his birthday bash. Because one personality is never enough!

WILL THEY SERVE COSMOS?


I’m not sure how I feel about the space program, but hey, if the nearby NASA Ames Research Center and something rather ominously called the Space Generation Advisory Council want to cohost a big rave at Moffett Field, presenting forward-minded DJs like Amon Tobin, John Tejada, Dr. Toast, and Tycho, well, beam me up (snort). I’m talking about Yuri’s Night, an astro-fantastical, techno-futuristical anniversary celebration of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s historic first flight into space in 1961. Yuri’s Night, Saturday, April 12, is being feted this year with 153 parties in 46 countries on goddess-knows-how-many giant-screen satellite feeds, so make sure your outfit is tight. Also on the blast-off tap: a huge technology fair with zippy visual installations and electronic doodad demonstrations galore. Pack your sonic screwdriver.

BIGGER BOOTY


Srsly, I wept when longtime San Francisco mainstay Fag Fridays ended in February — and not just because my Moisture Wear wasn’t quite so hypoallergenic after all. The gay and their ilk really lost something when the party shut down after 12 years, not least of all a soulful house crashpad in the weekend’s early afterhours.

No more tears, though. "Girl, we couldn’t wait to have a Friday off!" David Peterson, one half of Fag promoters Big Booty, exuberantly told me. Big Booty’s certainly taking advantage of its free time. Peterson’s Booty partner, Jose Mineros, just launched a bouncy house Saturday weekly, Collide, at the fab Club 222 (www.myspace.com/222hyde). Fag Fridays will make a special return at Mighty for Pride. And biggest of all, Big Booty just launched a new dance-music label, Thread Recordings. They’ll be toasting Thread’s first release, "The Rhythm" by DJ David Harness, with a deep and thrilling party at luminous megaclub Temple, featuring Harness and legendary NYC DJ Tedd Patterson. Boys keep swinging.

BLOW UP

With Jeffrey Paradise

Fri/11, 10 p.m.–2 a.m., $10

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

www.myspace.com/blow_up_415

YURI’S NIGHT

Sat/12, 2 p.m.–2 a.m., $40–$50

NASA Ames Research Center

Moffett Field, Mountain View

www.ynba.org

THREAD RECORD RELEASE PARTY

With Tedd Patterson and David Harness

April 19, 10 p.m.–4 a.m., $20

Temple

540 Howard, SF

(415) 572-1466

www.templesf.com

A-gain

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I have a friend who claims to be asexual. Although women (and occasionally men) have expressed romantic interest in him, he never seems to want to pursue a physical relationship — or any kind of intimate relationship at all. He says he’s quite happy, but I’m confused. Doesn’t everyone have some level of sexual desire? Or is there really an asexual community out there which is happy to be untouched? What do you know about this?

Love,

A OK?

Dear A OK?:

Oh, lots. I wrote about asexuality a few years ago following a big cover story about it in New Scientist [11/03/04], in the course of which I discovered that the movement’s Web master and spokesperson, David Jay, is not only local but went to my alma mater with a close friend of mine and therefore is practically family. So I know everything about it!

OK, I don’t know everything — but I can answer questions. Most people, barring those rarities like the This American Life interviewee I call "The Man with No Testosterone," may have "some level" of sexual desire flickering away in there somewhere. But if that flame is sufficiently dim or sufficiently unappealing to the flickeree, he or she may chose to ignore it altogether. Some, though, have searched their psyches and failed to detect even the faintest flicker of interest, and they may feel fine about that. It seems to me that the most reasonable reaction to people who feel fine is to feel fine back at them. Still, asexuality remains somewhat of a hard sell.

For whatever reason, many people — sexual people — find it hard to accept the idea that nobody is under any obligation either to feel desire or to act on it. Most of us are accustomed both to wanting sex and to wanting to want sex. (Desire disorders are the new erectile dysfunction — expect to see, say, Michelle Obama starring in a commercial for a breakthrough treatment in a few years.) How can people have no desire to feel desire? Aren’t they broken? Don’t they want to be fixed? Shouldn’t they want to be fixed? If you take these sane, rational adults at their word, that word is no.

As I was procrastinating answering your question a friend mentioned she knew an asexual woman who’d been interviewed about it on TV, which led me to this YouTube clip where you can see many of the asexuality movement’s big names (well, it’s a small pond, but these are the people who are most frequently interviewed and featured on Web sites and the like) telling their stories and proudly proclaiming their lack of interest in getting in your pants. (I can’t remember the chant I made up for them the last time I wrote about this: "We’re A / We’re OK / Now just go away," maybe?) I can’t promise that this clip or any of the others available online is any better than any other 4.5 minutes given a serious but potentially salacious subject on a typical TV magazine show. After the interviews the reporter turns to the camera and dutifully chirps, "Of course, some experts doubt even the existence of asexuality!" Of course they do! There are experts who will appear on these shows to doubt the existence of air if it gets them on TV. And then there’s the odious sexologist Joy Davidson, who offers this take while wearing an awful lot of lipstick:

Presenter: Can labeling oneself asexual become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Davidson: You might as well label yourself not curious, unadventurous, narrow-minded, blind to possibilities…. That’s what happens when you label yourself as … sexually neutered.

Well, they didn’t label themselves that way, lady. You did. Davidson’s insistence that people who don’t want to have sex must be in some way damaged reminds me, irritatingly, of another well-known sex therapist I heard claiming that Viagra and friends cause as much damage to a relationship as they repair, and that if you really want to overcome erectile dysfunction you have to see a therapist. But Davidson is meaner.

So, yes, your friend is probably telling the truth, and yes, there is such a community of "out" asexuals, albeit largely online (but there’s no shame in that — all hail the Internet’s awesome community-building powers!). The one thing you’re wrong about is the supposition that such people eschew intimacy of any sort. There are folks like that, of course, but we’d do better to call them "hermits." Asexuals have intense friendships and even romantic relationships. They identify, in many cases, as straight or gay, although it’s hard not to imagine an asexual lesbian, for instance, as someone who’s particularly interested in not having sex with women. You could get a little woozy thinking that way.

I do have to admit wondering whether asexuals like David Jay could be having as much "fun" as they routinely claim to have. "We’re having too much fun to have sex!" How much fun does anyone have, really, who isn’t, say, a professional skateboarder or a four-year-old? Who has the time?

Love,

Andrea

For an older column on this subject, see www.altsexcolumn.com/index.php?article=373

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.

Club Gossip

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REVIEW Wanna gossip? Of course you do. Can you believe that Justin Timberlake is inducting Madonna into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Wasn’t he, like, one when her first single dropped? I know.

OK, so I was four years old, but at least I remember watching the "Lucky Star" video premiere on MTV, in which Madonna exposed the navel that would launch a now-25-year career.

But it wasn’t fuzzy navels I was hung up on at video dance night Club Gossip’s Madonna tribute Feb. 29. It was the Material Girl: a vodka, peach schnapps, and cranberry juice concoction. Two sticky-sweet cocktails later, it was time to dance to DJed songs and VJed videos that documented Madonna’s many reinventions from her playful early years to her controversial Sex book era to her current kabbalah/yoga-mother period.

If my Madonna moves had been rusty, all those tips on Wikihow.com’s entry labeled "How to Dance Like Madonna" — which encouraged me to wear a tight outfit, get edgy, and release my inhibitions — really helped me get into the groove. Before I knew it, I was bopping, vogue-ing, and disco dancing along with a new crop of twentysomething Madonna wannabes in headbands and bangles.

While Madonna may have been an odd artist to honor at a night that generally concentrates on darker bands such as the Smiths, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Depeche Mode, there is no disputing her brief goth flirtation via her "Frozen" video. I may have heard a rumor that that wasn’t her song, but no, that kinda gossip isn’t welcome on this night. The girls would’ve taken my eyes out with their crucifixes.

CLUB GOSSIP Second Saturdays, 9:30 p.m.–3 a.m. $7. Cat Club, 1190 Folsom, SF. (415) 703-8964, www.myspace.com/clubgossip

‘Battlestar Galactica”s season-opening salvo whirls by like a black-out trip to Earth

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First: what an amazingly over-the-top press kit housing season four’s opening episode. The disk came tucked in the rear pocket of a framed, numbered print of the Battlestar Galactica cast in Last Supper mode. Quite a souvenir for the trophy room – the first episode of the series’ fourth and final season airs Friday, April 4.

The April 4 season opener, “He That Believeth in Me,” unfolds as pals/lovers Lee “Apollo” Adama and Kara “Starbuck” Thrace trade glances from their respective ships as they fly alongside each other. Starbuck assures him that she’s been to Earth and he’s “gonna love it.” Oh, yeah? Vipers and Raiders battle, splattering organic toaster guts on Starbuck’s windshield: splashy! The opening episode boasts notably more nuanced, beautifully realized special effects – the powers-that-be are clearly not holding anything back for the last season. The cinematography and effects here are lush, showy, and cinematic in their detail.

Surprise! Starbuck’s hubby Sam is now a Viper pilot and he suits up and gets ready to take on his Cylon brethren for the first time – leading to an eerie mano-y-mano, eyeball-to-Cylon-iris-scan moment when a Raider turns and connects with him. The Cylons seem to have the humans on the run but suddenly they turn back. Has sleeper Cylon Sam been “activated”? The knowing looks exchanged by all the new humanoid Cylons reach some kind of climax as now-outed-Cylon/once-ace-Cylon-hater Colonel Saul Tigh fantasizes about shooting his best friend, Admiral William Adama, in a dream sequence reminiscent of Sharon “Boomer” Valerii’s assassination attempt. Meanwhile, Dr. Gaius Balthar gets drawn into a sweet lil’ female-dominated (sex) cult of sorts: is it a fantasy or nightmare come true? And has Balthar become a faith healer, he of little faith? The egotistical scientist’s semi-comic scenes are always a welcome relief amid BSG’s general gloom. The mystery surrounding Starbuck’s seeming death and sudden reappearance deepens: she says she simply woke up at one point – after her ship apparently burst into flames – and found herself flying above Earth. She has photos and everything. Nevertheless, everyone thinks she’s a Cylon.

Clearly a transitional episode, “He That Believeth in Me” sets up more questions than it answers. Newbies will wonder what the fuss is all about; enthralled BSGers will be satisfied that so many narrative threads are getting picked up and tugged.

T-Ball

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

I’ve written aplenty about testosterone: for instance, the then-new research demonstrating that high testosterone does not make a male a winner as much as winning makes a male’s testosterone high; and the current vogue for prescribing T for everything formerly ascribed, with a shrug and a sigh, to "getting older." I’ve taught a bunch about hormones, describing estrogen — with its touch-and smell-sensitivity enhancing, "receptive" sexuality-producing qualities — as the "fuck me hormone," leaving chin-jutting, bad-boy testosterone to be described, inevitably, as the "fuck you" hormone. I’ve also been quick to explain that that’s a joke, son, and to debunk that characterization, emphasizing that women have and need T as much as men do (if in lower quantities), and that aggressive men do not turn out to have higher levels than their meeker brethren. Without testosterone, nobody gets laid — not even lesbians.

And then recently we took the kids to the children’s museum and I insisted that, naps and lunch be damned, we had to be in the car for the broadcast (actually a rerun) of This American Life’s testosterone episode. (Hear it for yourself at www.thislife.org, Episode 220.) You could skip producer Alex Blumberg’s introduction about coming of age while feeling guilty for even having testosterone, due to an early (and entirely uncalled-for) reading of Marilyn French’s "seminal" feminist potboiler The Women’s Room (Ballantine, 1988). Just don’t miss the segment on the man with no T (Act One: "Life at Zero") which will, in a mere seven minutes, turn everything you think you know about testosterone on its head. The interviewee, who had written an anonymous piece for GQ, developed an unspecified, rapid onset condition that shut down his T production entirely. But before he got a diagnosis, he simply … ceased wanting. Anything.

We know that T supplies the drive for sex and possibly for success, but with absolutely none in this guy’s system, he had no drive for anything. He stared at the wall, un-driven to get up. He could live on Wonder Bread spread with Miracle Whip and want nothing else, although he didn’t particularly want that, either. Everything looked beautiful because he lacked the will to judge it as anything else. He didn’t bother trying to see his girlfriend. He became, in short, a sort of bodhisattva, but without any sense of spiritual enlightenment — evolved, but in a meaningless way. An enlitened being, if you will. He sounded relieved, yet a bit let down to be reconnected, via supplementation, to the world of drives and wants and needs and giving a shit, rather the way people who have near-death experiences often describe resisting the pull to return to their heavy, duty-bound corporeal selves. An amazing story, implying as it does that without T life is, if not precisely not worth living, not worth caring about whether one lives it or not.

More familiar but in some ways equally startling was the interview with transman Griffin Hansbury, who, at the time, had entirely enough or possibly too much T in his system — enough to fuel a few bar fights and an inappropriate remark or two to a female coworker. Hansbury started out, like pretty much every F2M I’ve known, as a women’s college–attending, women’s studies–studying, "Take Back the Night"–type womyn’s wummin, and ended up … a pig. He is honest and extremely funny, describing how under the influence of massive amounts of T, he started dogging women around and getting turned on — literally — by the piston action of passing machinery. He said stupid stuff. He offended people; and moreover, felt entitled to do so. Most alarming, he became suddenly, uncharacteristically interested in and even good at math and science, like a sort of instant anti-Barbie. I hesitate to extrapolate from this (as does Hansbury). I hesitate to even think about it, if I can help it. If one of my kids (I have a boy and a girl, a built-in controlled experiment) asks, later, what makes somebody good at math, you better believe I won’t say "testosterone." Unless it’s true. I can’t wait to find out, I tell you what.

There’s also the story in a recent New York Times mag about the current and discomforting (to some; I think it’s kinda cool) phenomenon of women entering colleges like Bryn Mawr and Wellesley and leaving as men, a situation the gender studies departments can pretty much take either blame or credit for, depending. I can’t think of a handier way to break down the old dualistic gender paradigm, myself. The new gents ought to take a lesson from the humorous and self-depreciating Griffin Hansbury, though, and be mindful not to act like total buttheads while they still have to share the dorm showers.

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.

Careers & Ed: Photo pro

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› culture@sfbg.com

A line snakes down Fell Street on a Friday evening in front of the Rickshaw Stop, where Meleksah Jurgenson cradles a large camera and surveys the over- and underdressed revelers in Hayes Valley. A man in bright sneakers and slouchy jeans calls her over: "Dude, Meleksah! You gotta take a photo of this!" He gleefully points to a poor shlub on the curb resting a weary head on his knees. The guy’s been there, immobile, for at least 20 minutes.

Jurgenson smiles apologetically. With her long brown hair pulled back and bangs cut straight across her forehead, her face is girl-next-door lovely: sweet, a little sly, and essentially nonthreatening. Like the sidewalk lush, her camera remains fixed in her hands. She doesn’t shoot.

"I want everyone to look back at the pictures and be just as excited [to see them] as I was to take them," she explains later. A native of Washington, DC — her mother is a photographer at the White House — Jurgenson is now a resident cameraperson at Mezzanine, as well as at the weekly Frisco Disco and Blow Up parties cohosted by her husband, Jeffrey Fare, at the Transfer and the Rickshaw Stop. (Fare, a former member of postpunk dance purveyors the Rapture, DJs at these parties under the names DJ Jefrodisiac and Jeffrey Paradise.)

A rigorously spontaneous career track — "I never make plans for the future," she says — found Jurgenson working as both a model and a party planner. "So it was a natural progression to move from booking and throwing parties to [hosting] nightclubs," she says. "And to move from shooting fashion editorials to being on the other side of the camera. I just fell into it."

As she walks around the Rickshaw Stop, the regular disco kids light up. Hugs and air kisses are exchanged; everyone poses, happily and extravagantly. The photos, tagged with a hot-pink stripe signed "Lady Meleksah," then pop up on the various outlets where she serves as contributor or founder: Blow Up’s official Web site, Jurgenson’s makeshift party-photo outlet friscodiscofever.blogspot.com, and electro-music blog Missingtoof.com, in addition to her personal MySpace and Flickr accounts.

But Jurgenson isn’t on the typical photographer career track. These days, young arts professionals are pushed to consolidate their work online, have extensive multimedia experience at their fingertips, and create profiles on sites such as LinkedIn to attract employers. So there’s something old school about what Jurgenson does: take photos, make friends, and get hired. The ease of social-networking sites comes along with random and uneven exposure, so she figures if you’re not being seen around town having a legitimately good time, then maybe you’re not the right person for the job.

In fact, Jurgenson, who only began shooting professionally two years ago, doesn’t even — gasp! — have an online portfolio. Despite this, she’s done some band shoots and magazine work. But her bread and butter is the nightclub scene. "I love the people, I love the music, I love the sex. I love the dancing. I love everything about it," she says. "Having the camera is almost secondary. I come home after these parties with bruises and beer spilled all over me, and I wouldn’t have it any other way." And the parties keep getting bigger: she shot the Winter Music Conference in Miami last month and will shoot at Coachella.

Perhaps one reason Jurgenson is so successful is that she has a slightly different take on club photography from the norm. For example, sites such as Los Angeles’s Cobra Snake or New York’s Last Night’s Party often court controversy for their photographers, who are criticized for taking advantage of the subjects’ inebriated states as much as for their photos. Visually, the images feature the short-range flash that briefly illuminates bleary-eyed faces and exposed bodies. Every so often, these bodies are shown lying next to a pool of their own vomit. But Jurgenson wants to capture people looking good and having a great time.

She also manages to get more intimate photos of people — and receives less criticism about her photos exploiting women — than most photographers (typically male) can get.

"I’m not an imposing guy shoving a camera in somebody’s face," she says. "I don’t think people are as threatened by me."

The people in her nightclub work appear as radiant as they must have felt at that very moment. Instead of featuring closed house parties and backstage antics with celebrities, her photos, laced with dazzling lights and brilliant colors, mostly take place on the open dance floor. Rather than exploiting blotto hipsters, Jurgenson shoots buoyant clubhoppers and exhibitionists unlikely to regret the posturing. "I don’t particularly like Cobra Snake or any of the other party photographers out there," she says. "I don’t want to capture pictures of a girl standing there making a silly face."

Jurgenson doesn’t bother photographing the aftereffects of the parties — the three-day hangover or the sore throat and lungs. Her work puts the most exuberant parts of the night on display — the parts that evoke carefree and careless times. It’s gloriously unapologetic and unabashedly playful. "Look, stop worrying about the ‘misspent youth,’" the faces seem to shout. "Just dance with us!"

"I think that’s what separates me from a lot of photographers," Jurgenson says. "I immerse myself in the festivities and shoot. To capture a party like I do, you have to be a part of it, not a photographer."

But when you’re a consummate hostess connecting and socializing with everyone around you, there’s no doubt that observing and participating in the environment changes it. But Jurgenson isn’t concerned with keeping photojournalistic distance. She likes to shake things up.

Other photographers are "sort of like birdwatchers," Jurgenson says. "But I’m on safari."

Clubs: Honey Soundsystem looks to ‘Dancer from the Dance’

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Honey! All photos by Joshua Rotter.

By Joshua Rotter

It’s a story as old as disco. Attractive “straight” Midwesterner moves to the big city to find himself, only to get blindsided by a barrage of drugs, sex, and tea dances. True, dancing became a major component of gay life in the post-Stonewall ’70s, when the dance floor served as both a place of expression and escape for many gay men. It’s this defining period in gay history that novelist Andrew Holleran highlighted in his 1978 novel, Dancer from the Dance.

honey2.bmp

Taking his title from poet William Butler Yeats’s 50 year-old line, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Holleran attempted to examine this brain-twister in his chronicle of gays looking for companionship and understanding in pre-AIDS New York City and Fire Island, by focusing on the misadventures of his beautiful yet provincial protagonist Anthony Malone, who loses himself in the shuffle and shag club scene.

Thirty years later, the Honey Soundsystem collective – DJs Pee Play, KenVulsion, Robot Hustle, Jason Kendig, and Josh Cheon – took cues from this groundbreaking work for their most recent theme party.

Teacher’s bet

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I have a bit of a moral dilemma. I am a submissive. Sometimes I correspond with, or even meet up with, people I find on the Internet for no-strings-attached fun. I always feel like I’m in control of my life, even when I’m chained up and blindfolded, and I think that it’s a healthy (enough) expression of my sexuality. However, I am also about to start training to be a teacher of kids under age 10.

Obviously, the two parts of my life have no relation to each other. But is it possible to pursue interests that could varyingly be described as "niche" or "perverted," and at the same time be a responsible caregiver to children? Do you think it is possible for my private life not to get in the way of my professional development?

Love,

Tied up in Knots

Dear Knots:

Of course I do. I’d better. I’m a retired pervert (I have no time!), and still writing this column and consorting with every stripe of (harmless) freak you can or can’t imagine. If I thought that knowing the people I know or admitting in public to having belonged to clubs which would now no longer have me as a member posed any sort of threat to my children — ever! — you better believe I’d be out of Pervertville and living in the suburbs wearing those weird sneaker-loafers (snoafers) that normal moms wear before you could say "I shop at Talbots." Happily, I don’t have to. There’s nothing about your hobby which should impede your ability to be the bestest teacher of little kids you can be. There’s nothing wrong with your hobby! Your question does set off some alarm bells, but I have no question that you can be not only a good person, but a self-directed one, fully in control — of your life, if not your limbs — while still enjoying being caught in any number of compromising positions.

What does worry me is the online hooking-up for activities that leave you helpless to defend yourself. I understand that some might find the very phrase "helpless to defend yourself" kind of hot (hell, I find the phrase kind of hot), and I’m also aware that real life is not an episode of Law and Order: Sleazy Exploitative Plotlines Unit. But seriously, I would not let strangers tie me up, and I wouldn’t mind if you didn’t, either. If you live in a major metropolitan area, you can join a club or take classes or otherwise meet people who would love to tie you up, and, even more important, meet other people who know those people. The chance that any of these Internet strangers might wish you harm is admittedly slight, but there are bad people in this world. Please try not to meet any.

The other thing about strangers, of course, is that you don’t know very much about them, including where they work and whom they know, which brings us to our next area of worry: how to keep your two worlds from ever, ever meeting. I’m imagining the principal at your new school arriving, toy bag in hand, to administer a good caning to that girl he met on the Internet (Or are you a guy? It doesn’t matter either way.) That scenario is far-fetched, granted, but you’ll be wanting — needing, actually — to keep your two lives rigorously separate from now on, if you aren’t already. I said your personal proclivities should not affect your ability to be a great teacher, and indeed they should not (if you find yourself so drawn to the alleged Dark Side that you can’t get it together to sleep or do lesson plans or get up for work in the morning, we’ll have another talk), but that depends utterly upon your ability to keep your secret self secret.

I am not a huge fan of the deep dark secret any more that I am big on urging people to blab to Aunt Babs at Sunday supper about their previous night’s exploration of scrotal inflation and anal electrodes: to everything its proper time and place, I say. You, though, are going to have to learn to be spectacularly discreet. Perverts are not a protected class, and people with little exposure to these things haven’t the faintest idea how to separate the lurid and usually deadly "whips and chains" depicted on Law and Order from the usual run of kink-sex reality, which is slightly less dangerous than golf thanks to fewer lightning strikes. Should they discover that one of those whips-and-chains people is — gasp — teaching the children, I can assure you that they will not be interested in becoming educated about it. They will be interested in having you drawn and quartered, and not in a fun way. Go ahead with your plans, but do shut up about it.

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.

Velvet Cantina

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GOOD SEATS, LAME EATS Our reservation was late, the table was still dirty when we sat down, utensils never showed until after our food, the margarita was more Rita than tequila, and the chile rellenos were not. But the electric sex glow of crimson velvet and soft candle lighting, our cozy round booth, and the vivacious Mission crowd begging for more sour-mix-satiated margaritas all made the Velvet Cantina enduring, if not enjoyable. Besides, any bad mixed drink can be fixed with a double shot splashed with the aforementioned overly-sweet concoctions.

So I was forced to eat my friend’s carne asada — which was divine — because my chicken mole was so sweet it tasted more like chicken morsel, and we mixed our own libations tableside. I guess participating in the process is part of the fun — isn’t that why fondue is the phenomenon it is? — but this was something else. I most definitely won’t go back for the grub, but I won’t hold the bartender’s heavy pour against the indiscriminate agaves nectar. The red walls were more scrumptious than the food, and while many palates might want to boycott most of the cuisine, the asada and nachos are enough to keep you sane.

Plus, booze is still booze, from whatever bar you choose. The vibrations from the excessively loud music had me strapping on my party shoes before our second round, and from our window side booth, I eventually found myself loving this place. Then again, tequila has that effect on me.

VELVET CANTINA Mon.–Thurs., 5–10:30p.m., bar open until midnight; Fri.–Sat., 5–11 p.m., bar until 2 a.m.; Sun. 5–10:30pm., bar until midnight. 3349 23rd St., SF. (415) 648-4142, www.velvetcantina.com

Hooker science

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TECHSPLOITATION The outrage over former New York governor Eliot Spitzer hiring an A-list hooker makes me feel like throwing a gigantic, crippling pile of superheavy biology and economics books at everyone in the United States and possibly the world. Are we still so Victorian in our thinking that we think it’s bad for somebody to pay large amounts of money for a few hours of skin-time with a professional? Have we not learned enough at this point about psychology and neuroscience to understand that a roll in the sheets is just a fun, chemical fizz for our brains and that it means nothing about ethics and morality?

The sad fact is that we have learned all that stuff, and yet most people still believe paying money for sex is the equivalent of killing babies on the moral report card. And yet nobody bothers to ask why, or to investigate past the sensational headlines. As far as I’m concerned, the one unethical thing Spitzer did was to hire a sex worker after prosecuting several prostitution rings. That’s hypocritical of him, and undermines my faith in him as a politician.

But let’s say Spitzer hadn’t prosecuted so-called sex crimes before, and all he was doing was hiring a lady for some sex. Here is what I don’t get: why is this bad? On the scale of things politicians can do – from sending huge numbers of young people to be killed in other countries to cutting programs aimed at helping foster kids get lunch money – hiring a sex worker is peanuts. It’s a personal choice! It’s not like Spitzer was issuing a statewide policy of mandatory hookers for everybody.

What really boggles the mind is the way so-called liberal media like National Public Radio and the New York Times have been attacking Spitzer’s morals as much as the conservative Fox News types have. In some cases, they’ve attacked him more. The reasons given are always the same: sex work is abusive to women (male prostitutes don’t exist?), and being paid for sex is inherently degrading.

Let’s look inside one of those heavy economics books that I just beat you with and examine these assumptions for a minute, OK? Every possible kind of human act has been commodified and turned into a job under capitalism. That means people are legally paid to clean up one another’s poop, paid to wash one another’s naked bodies, paid to fry food all day, paid to work in toxic mines, paid to clean toilets, paid to wash and dress dead naked bodies, and paid to clean the brains off walls in crime scenes. My point is, you can earn money doing every possible degrading or disgusting thing on earth.

And yet, most people don’t think it’s immoral to wipe somebody else’s bum or to fry food all day, even though both jobs could truthfully be described as inherently degrading. They say, "Gee that’s a tough job." And then they pay the people who do those jobs minimum wage.

The sex worker Spitzer visited, on the other hand, was paid handsomely for her tough job. The New York Times, in its mission to invade this woman’s privacy (though in what one must suppose is a nonexploitative way), reported that she was a midrange worker at her agency who pulled in between $1000–$2000 per job. She wasn’t working for minimum wage; she wasn’t forced to inhale toxic fumes that would destroy her chances of having a nonmutant baby. She was being paid a middle-class salary to have sex. Sure, it might be an icky job, in the same way cleaning up barf in a hospital can be icky. But was she being economically exploited? Probably a hell of a lot less than the janitor in the hospital mopping up vomit cleaning up after you.

Sure, there are hookers who are exploited and who have miserable lives. There are people who are exploited and miserable in a lot of jobs. But the misery is circumstantial: not all hookers are exploited, just as not all hospital workers are exploited. It’s basic labor economics, people.

Audacia Ray, former sex worker and editor of the sex worker magazine $pread, has pointed out that the public doesn’t even seem to understand what exploitation really means. The woman who did sex work for Spitzer has had her picture and personal history splattered all over the media in an incredibly insulting way. Nobody seems to realize she’s being degraded far more now than she ever was when Spitzer was her client. And she’s not getting any retirement savings out of it, either.

Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who
once hired a prostitute for a few hundred bucks and had a pretty good time.

SXSW: Touch down! Plans, schplans…

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cas sml.jpg
Won’t you listen to Cassettes Won’t Listen.

“Punk rock – we don’t have that category in this country.” Oh, the quotables already emanating from Austin, Texas – albeit from a boomer-rock-oriented radio commentator interviewing aging Aussie punk vets.

SXSW, here we go again. The plane was packed on the way from Denver to Austin. Baggage claim was filled with checked guitars and black-garbed hollow-eyed scenesters. Todd P already had a Juicebox show going at 2 a.m. at his party central, Ms. Bea’s. And rumors are already swirling – has Dolly Parton cancelled? Is it possible to squirm into the already-closed-guestlist Playboy afterhours party Thursday night? Where is Perez Hilton having his ssseeecccret soiree (with Robyn no doubt working her rework of Snoop Dogg’s “Sex Eruption”)? Rachel Ray is having a party – huh?! You can spend more time planning your sked than actually seeing music, but the one-man band sounds of Cassettes Won’t Listen drew me into the Austin Convention Center’s dark, semi-depressing, school-caf-like Daystage.

Most disturbing news: so many longtimers aren’t making it this year due to industry cutbacks. Most disturbing stuff in the fest bag o’ fliers: an Armed Forces Entertainment card with a little green toy soldier attached (“Plug in your weapon, turn up the power and fire away. Your limo is a Humvee and your ride is a Blackhawk”). War is so cute – and glamorous! And a card announcing a casting call for Blue Man (I guess the blue face paint fits any ole one – except maybe women?).

What’s up tonight? Free Yr Radio is throwing a bash with Simian Mobile Disco, Yeasayer (all the buzz here, natch), and Times New Viking (Ohio-ans do it so good) at La Zona Rosa, a black rock showcase with Lightspeed Champion courtesy of Vice, a Kills show at the Fader Fort, an Emusic showcase, White Williams at the Gorilla vs Bear party. Also drool-worthy is the Terrorbird/Forcefield PR party with Yacht, Raveonettes, Why?, These New Puritans, the Blow, Radar Bros., Bowerbirds, and the return of the Mae Shi. Kimya Dawson will likely be at the Keep Austin Good event at San Hotel’s parking lot, and Dan Deacon and Deer Tick are making some very late-night noise – shhhh! – at one o’ UT Austin’s quads at, oh, 2 a.m. And most of those events aren’t even official.

Beautiful losers

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Great movies stay with you in the oddest ways. In the days after I first saw Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, I was preternaturally attuned to the sound of skateboards dragging the street outside my bedroom window—the slow tug of concrete, the bumping waves of wheels. This ambient strain surrounds Paranoid Park‘s cherubic point of focus: Alex (Gabe Nevins), a sleepy-eyed skater waiting out his parents’ divorce in a Portland, Ore., suburb. He occupies most of the film’s exquisitely composed frames, though he’s more a figure etched in light than a proper protagonist.

Figure-eight narrations and slow-moving Steadicam tracks have underpinned Van Sant’s last couple of films (2003’s Elephant, 2005’s Last Days), though they’re more artfully embedded in Paranoid Park‘s fragrant sprawl, not least because of the visual equivalencies provided by the film’s skateboarding footage. Blake Nelson’s airless young-adult novel presents Alex’s story as an extended confessional letter. Van Sant dissembles chronology and inflects the narration with associative freedom.

Most immediately, Van Sant folds Nelson’s plot to delay the central trauma, which first enters our vision peripherally through a detective’s investigation and a local news report. With that said, narrowing the effect of this organizing principle is a little like trying to get a fix on Phil Spector’s reverb or Gerhard Richter’s gray — Van Sant’s placid puzzling is a textural aesthetic before it’s a device. Where Nelson’s moral tale is a streamlined account, Van Sant’s adaptation aims for something more transparent and sublime. His Alex is at once layered and laid bare.

This channeling begins with a slow-creeping tracking shot as Alex is interviewed by a detective. What begins as a conversation eventually lands as a full-frame portrait of the adolescent, the detective’s words ("What’s your parental situation?") left hanging in the air, irrelevant. As Nevins garbles his lines, the boundary between the nonprofessional actor and his character becomes palpably blurred. Does Van Sant’s MySpace casting call automatically qualify as tawdriness? Not when Paranoid Park maintains its enigmatic distance. Indeed, Van Sant renders the film’s MacBook surfaces — the subdued luminescence, boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, and soundtrack shuffle from Elliot Smith to the Juliet of the Spirits score all evoke a MacBook — as something unique and refined.

Like so many high school boys, Alex is essentially passive (see the film’s hilarious sex scene, with talky girlfriend Jennifer’s blond wisps dissolving Alex’s face like something from Maya Deren’s 1943 Meshes of the Afternoon). Van Sant captures this state via formal permeability, rigorously designing Paranoid Park‘s memory machine as a head trip. Strips of slow motion, a narrow-depth-of-field, ping-ponging sound, a mumbled voice-over — all these elements serve to cover the largely amateur cast but also to project Alex’s environmental interiority. This tendency reaches a swollen apex during a posttraumatic shower. The camera again draws in, and Christopher Doyle’s typically luscious lensing isolates every droplet; the lighting darkens, and the blistering sheets of water-noise are overlaid with thick forest sounds as Alex drops his head, revealing the bathroom wallpaper’s bird motif.

There’s no buried logic to Paranoid Park, and even though it’s shaped as much like a jigsaw as Donnie Darko (2001) and Rian Johnson’s underappreciated Brick (2005), it doesn’t invite solutions. Whether or not Alex’s withholding aura is read as a symbolic closeting, Van Sant’s direction is some kind of sorcery, especially in those B-roll streams of easy riders through which the film’s story expands to encompass all breathless teenage riots. Paranoid Park ends with these images after cutting from Alex asleep in biology class, dreaming of flying. He never touches the ground, always hovering between idyll and responsibility, the dream and his place in it. (Max Goldberg)

PARANOID PARK

Opens March 21 at Bay Area theaters
www.myspace.com/gusvansant

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