The more we move forward chronologically, the more we regress musically. Popular music in 2008 proved this point loud and clear. So much for the hope of diversity and new thought promised by the Internet/information age. Whether it was the already-worn-out classic rock of previous decades, recycled to gullible new generations via Guitar Hero, etc., or the unoriginal, so-called "new music" artists churning out retro-sounding hits, this year’s pop has so completely eaten and re-eaten itself, it has regurgitated itself into a corner.
This year offered up some envelope-pushing and genuinely new-sounding music, especially within such genres as hip-hop, psyche/noise/experimental, and tech-house. Yet the majority of music fans opted, despite access to much new music via the Internet that they don’t even have to pay for, to blindly buy into the hype fed to them by their favorite TV shows, Blog tastemakers, or Facebook buddies. And I am not just singling out the American Idol–watching drones who made Jordin Sparks a star, or their tween siblings/offsprings who catapulted the Jonas Brothers to pop stardom.
The supposedly free-thinking hipsters are as bad, if not worse, when it comes to keeping unoriginal music alive and well. Examples of celebrated so-called new-music makers of 2008 that I am talking about include the Black Keys (’70s rock), Santogold (’80s pop/new wave), Hercules and Love Affair (’70s disco), TV on the Radio (’80s alt-rock), and boring buzz band of the year, Vampire Weekend (early-’80s band Orange Juice with a dash of Afropop). At least with the 2008 return of Portishead and My Bloody Valentine and the continuation of groups like REM and Radiohead, we got the music firsthand from its originators. Meanwhile mashup media darling Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals (Illegal Art) only further proved that his retro taste in music — from crappy recent-year Dirty South anthems to cheesy ’80s synth-pop — totally diminishes his genuine talent as a producer.
For the most part, 2008 proved that while you can give the masses access to all of the greatest sounds out there, most will simply buy into the trends fed to them. Oh, and speaking of tired trends and musical styles, would someone please get Kanye West and T-Pain to an AA (AutoTune Anonymous) meeting, pronto.
BILLY JAM’S 2008 TOP 10
1. Paris, Acid Reflex (Guerrilla Funk)
2. DJ Quest Questolous (Zebra Quest)
3. Nas, Untitled (Island Def Jam)
4. Mochipet, Microphonepet (Daly City)
5. Del tha Funkee Homosapien, The 11th Hour (Def Jux)
6. J-Live, Then What Happened? (BBE)
7. Azeem, Air Cartoons (Oaklyn)
8. Mike Relm, Spectacle (Radio Fried)
9. Raashan Ahmad The Push (Om)
10. Foreign Legion, The Secret Knock EP (Hungerstrike)
WASHINGTON — According to news reports, President-elect Barack Obama will appoint Julius Genachowski as chair of the Federal Communications Commission.
Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press, issued the following statement:
“Under Julius Genachowski’s leadership, the FCC’s compass would point toward the public interest. President-elect Obama has provided a clear roadmap of his media and technology priorities. We share Obama’s goals of creating a more diverse, democratic media system and providing fast, affordable, open Internet access for everyone. We greatly look forward to working with Mr. Genachowski to put the president-elect’s plan into action.
“The challenges facing the next FCC are enormous — a vast digital divide, an open Internet in jeopardy, consolidated media ownership, newsrooms in economic freefall and entrenched industries invested in maintaining the status quo. This moment calls for bold and immediate steps to spur competition, foster innovation and breathe new life into our communications sector. With his unique blend of business and governmental experience, Genachowski promises to provide the strong leadership we need.”
Wall Street Journal: Obama to Nominate Genachowski to Head FCC
Free Press is a national, nonpartisan organization working to reform the media. Through education, organizing and advocacy, we promote diverse and independent media ownership, strong public media, and universal access to communications. Learn more at www.freepress.net
Let us not forget serious media reform as President-Elect Obama accelerates his work on his governing team and agenda. The Guardian, as attentive readers know, has long supported media reform on many fronts ranging from the overhaul of the federal antitrust laws and the Federal Communications Commission to the return of the Fairness Doctrine. We also support the important work and program of the Free Press media reform organization as a major force in driving these reforms. Here is its latest timely call to action and a media reform agenda the Guardian supports. .
FREE PRESS: ACTION ALERT!
Any moment now, President-elect Barack Obama will announce his choice to lead the Federal Communications Commission. We need to be sure the person he chooses lives up to Obama’s campaign pledges to reform the media in America.
Technically, we’re not doing the hiring, but the administration needs to be reminded by all of us that the new chair must put Main Street before Wall Street.
The FCC has been held hostage by corporate interests for too long. Now is our best chance to change course and make real the possibility of universal broadband access, an open Internet, and more locally controlled radio and TV.
The new FCC chair will be charged with bringing American media into the 21st century, which is why Obama must hear from you before deciding.
Tell us what you want the new FCC chair to do, and we’ll deliver the results of the poll to Obama’s transition team. It’s time the FCC met the challenges of reform and renewed the media’s role in our democracy.
This is one of the most important job openings to be filled by the next administration. Let’s speak out to make sure we find the right person for the job.
The best time to hear AC/DC — besides during the obvious coked-out, high-speed cop chase — is at a party. At least this is my personal fave: during a party I’m throwing and controlling the music being played.
I love the part of the night when it is appropriate to put on the first AC/DC song, really loud. It has to be pretty late — when the strangers start filing in, cigarettes are being smoked everywhere, and the rules have been tossed out. People need to be drunk enough to dance to AC/DC, after all — and the first song has to be "It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll)."
The problem here is that once you start playing AC/DC, you have nowhere to go. You’ve reached the ceiling as far as loud rock ‘n’ roll music goes, from here you have to get into crazy metal or ubernoise in order to keep the bar set in the red. And if you play Pig Destroyer, even though the middle of the song might be awesome, awesome, awesome, by the time you get there, you’ve alienated almost everybody. So some restraint is necessary. I used to actually think about this while DJing parties and I eventually came up with the answer: what you do is play more AC/DC.
You start with Bon Scott-era stuff — a little "Jailbreak," "Beating Around the Bush," "Live Wire," and "Sin City" — then you drop Brian Johnson’s flat, cap-lidded bleat and the high-tech production of "Thunderstruck" on them. You’re now free to play "Safe in New York City," "Sink the Pink," anything — just stay away from "You Shook Me All Night Long," because you may as well play Bob Seger’s "Old Time Rock and Roll." And you gotta put on "Moneytalks" at some point.
AC/DC has a new album, titled Black Ice (Columbia). This is studio album 15 and is officially available for purchase either directly through the group’s Web site or at Wal-Mart. I didn’t get a promo copy of it and I don’t really shop at Wal-Mart much, except to get their spicy wings, which are fantastic, but I was able to hear some of the songs on YouTube, so I can give a somewhat informed review of the album. Like I said, I found the stuff on YouTube, but I didn’t watch the video for lead single, "Rock ‘n’ Roll Train," because, well, I love AC/DC, but even I have to admit that Angus Young wearing a school kid uniform as he approaches AARP eligibility is a little embarrassing.
I mean, the poor guy, he’s been duck-walking around the stage and over-performing for 40 years practically! Doesn’t it get to be like forced labor after a while? After, say, 30 years? Yipes.
Anyway here goes: the songs on Black Ice start with a bass line, then one guitar picks up the rhythm riff, then after exactly eight bars, the second guitar comes in, echoing the riff. Four bars pass, and the drums come in along with Brian Johnson screeching about women that could only have existed in the 1980s — "She’ll burn your eyeballs out," "she’s got it all," "she has two great danes on a leash," etc. Young peels off a blaring solo that erupts at exactly the right time, the chorus is repeated — peppered by "honey"s and "hey-hey"s from Johnson — and it all fades out. For my money, the tried-and-true formula works best on "Skies on Fire" and "Big Jack," which is about a guy who’s really got the knack and also never goes anywhere without a sack.
OK, the guys in AC/DC aren’t geniuses, and maybe they’ve been at it a little too long, but the formula still works, it always will, and Black Ice — like just about every one of their records — is not meant to be sat around with and listened to. The idea is to play it at parties, and you’re not supposed to look too closely at it. The idea is to let it wash over you. *
CHEAP EATS Earl Butter made the sauce and I put meatballs in it. You could smell this on the stairs. Between the first and second floors it was something, and between the second and third it was something else. The meatballs had beef and pork and cheese, garlic, parsley, an egg, some old bread crumbs … basically, whatever I could find in Earl Butter’s kitchen. I browned them in bacon fat; then, while they were bobbing in the saucy gurgle, I washed the soccer off of me in Earl Butter’s shower.
Five zip we’d lost. I tossed a salad, boiled spaghetti, Wayway brought the bread, and it was Sunday afternoon all over again. My hair air dries. I do not use hair dryers.
I use a towel.
The occasion: a visit from our own private Idahoan, Johnny "Jack" Blogger, né Johnny "Jack" Journalism, né Johnny "Jack" Poetry, the master of doing what he does, and being what he does, and words and I guess horses.
There were eight people total gathered around a couple of makeshift tables, spinning mismatched forks and raising glasses and bottles and eyebrows to bad jokes, good food, and questionable politics. We laughed until it hurt, ate until it hurt, and then one of us had to go give a massage, another was late for load-in and sound check, a couple needed a nap, and dirty dishes beckoned.
Somehow Johnny "Jack," our guest of honor, wound up doing most of them. I helped. When I go to Idaho, Johnny "Jack" and his wife, Mrs. "Jack," always have a big pot of something or other waiting for me. Mac and cheese. Red beans and rice. It’s a long drive.
When he showed up here, a couple nights before spaghetti, I had jambalaya, which is my new favorite thing to make. And eat. I am eating the leftovers as we speak, and I gotta say: yum. Every time I make jambalaya I have to call Crawdad de la Cooter five times to ask about this or that or rice, and I suppose that’s partly what I love about jambalaya. That tech support comes with it.
You can toast the rice first, or not, or sauté it a little with the "holy trinity" of onions, celery, peppers, and garlic, and, oh, you can imagine how a chicken farmer loves four-thing trinities!
But this time Crawdad called me. "What are you cooking?" she asked.
"Jambalaya," I said. "Here. Talk to John." And I handed him the phone. My two favorite laughs, his and hers, but I could only hear one of them and wished I had a speaker phone.
At the show that night three of our spaghetti friends were playing in two different bands. Everyone was there and I talked to a lot of people I hadn’t seen in some time and lost my voice. That’s just one reason why this column isn’t exactly saying anything.
On the way back to the woods we stopped at a late-night Chinese joint for something to eat. Up high near the ceiling in a corner was a medium-size fish tank with medium-size fishes swimming back and forth, winding around like letters, trying real hard to spell P-O-R-K and B-E-E-F and even C-H-I-C-K-E-N, and really only looking like fish in a fish tank. And tasty ones at that. Which reminded me of this article even before I started to write it.
Johnny "Jack" Blogger has been blogging and talking a lot about nostalgia. This ain’t that. My own happy happy sizzly sadness is set some time in the future. I don’t want to be fried, or cooked in a clay pot either, but there is something delicious in my medium-size heart, flop and roll and apropos of none of the above. I twist, I turn, I sink and spin, and can’t even begin to spell it.
My new favorite restaurant is Lee Hou, which claims to be "the very first Chinese restaurant on Clement." So … OK, so they’ve had a long time to perfect their salt and pepper chicken wings. We also got lamb sticks, because that seemed like good road food, but the wings were 10 times better and soared us, and we got crumbs and bones all over Johnny "Jack"<0x2009>‘s car, not mine. Damn it! Some things we didn’t eat: snails, duck tongue, and goose intestines. Oh, and fish. *
Thanks to the continued explosion of musically-oriented Web sites and blogs, you’ll probably be even more inundated than usual this year with "best of 2008" lists come January 2009 — far too late for your tuneful shopping needs. So we’re cranking one out early, organized by affinity groups — some slightly imaginary, some more concrete — in an attempt to cut through the loud hype and scattered bombast while amping up your gift-giving options. At the end is a suggested list of delectable upcoming live shows, if you’re more ticket-oriented.
FOR THE RETRO-FUTURIST DISCO HEAD
Electronic music is a good example of how griping about the state of a scene can sometimes release unexpected creativity. Syclops, nominally a Finnish fusion trio, is the latest we’ve heard from Maurice Fulton since his quasi-breakthrough electro-spazz project Mu. I’ve Got My Eye on You is the longest in a line of pretty epic wins for the label DFA and for electronic music generally: radiating out from "Where’s Jason’s K," the 10 tracks that make up the album tear ass from pharma’d-out Detroit techno to dreamy, lush deep space jazz.
Also: Shed‘s Shedding the Past (Ostgut Tonträger) if your giftee’s the type who longs for the halcyon days of high minimal glitch; Nôze, Songs on the Rocks (Get Physical) if his or her affection for tech house precision is matched only by a love of closing-time sing-alongs and Waitsian growls.
FOR LONG-LIMBED INDIE SCRAPPERS
It would be hard to write enough about "Black Rice," the best song on Canadian indie quartet Women‘s self-titled debut on Jagjaguwar. Starting from an absurdly unambitious guitar line, the song blossoms into something wildly and fiercely beautiful. It could be the impossible falsetto of the chorus, or the way the rhythm section comes unglued from the vocals and guitar, but the song condenses what makes the rest of the album — noisy, lo-fi interludes and all — so engaging. Everything seems held together provisionally on a song like the heartrending "Shaking Hand," but the chorus snaps into place with rubber-banded eagerness.
Also: Abe Vigoda‘s Skeleton (PPM) for its irrepressible youthful longing and controlled thrash; Benoît Pioulard‘s Temper (Kranky) for twining the threads of noise and surprisingly pretty, almost adult-contemporary songwriting into a neither/nor album that’s perfect for gray days.
WEIRDOS ONLY
Although more structured than anything they’ve done before, Saint Dymphna (Social Registry), the newest long player from New York’s mystical vibe crew Gang Gang Dance, still arrives packed with the otherworldliness that characterized its excellent predecessor, God’s Money (Social Registry, 2005). Three years in the making, the album itself is nothing if not well paced: the transitions between songs and the gradual build of rhythmic energy make it less kin to trad rock albums than to DJ mixes. When the swells crest, as on "First Communion" and "House Jam," electronic gurgles and processed sounds that might otherwise sound like trying too hard are transformed into pure pith: they’re as inviting and faceted as a just-split pomegranate.
Also: Paavoharju‘s Laulu Laakson Kukista (Fonal), since these Finnish folksters cover the dance floor with silt on "Kevätrumpu," bust some desperate torch techno on "Uskallan," and spend a number of other tracks sounding stuck between pagan classical radio and deteriorating field recordings; Rings is a trio of new primitives formerly known as First Nation — on Black Habit (Paw Tracks), the outfit sounds like it’s gotten into the Slits’ basements and started making music dictated from beyond.
POST-HIP-HOP BASS SEMANTICS
A DJ mix that stands alone as an album is a rare thing, but leave it to Jace Clayton, a.k.a. DJ/rupture, to make one, as he has with Uproot (Agriculture). Deeply, er, rooted in the bass plate tectonics of dubstep and cut with the finest in eclectic samples, ranging from experimentalist Ekkehard Ehlers to lazer bass don Ghislain Poirier, Uproot rolls deep with dubbed-out ambience, but DJ/rupture is just as happy to turn things upside down, as when he plunks down Ehlers’ gorgeous string loop, "Plays John Cassavetes, Pt. 2," around the mix’s halfway point. And if bangers of the future don’t sound like "Gave You All My Love (Matt Shadetek’s I Gave You All My Dub Remix)," which subs out dub’s organic space for Fisher-Price primary-color contrasts that split the brain evenly in two, I’m not sure it’s a future worth living in.
Also: for the more historically minded, Ragga Twins have released Step Out! (Soul Jazz), a retrospective that collects the work of a duo widely considered to be the inventors of that dubstep ancestor, jungle; Tank Thong Mixtape (Weaponshouse) by Megasoid happens to be free, so spend some money on a nice CD-R, decorate it with glitter, and watch exasperation turn to glee when your loved one blows out his or her speakers with this beast.
HEAVY STUFF
One of the year’s most life-affirming releases comes from a band called Fucked Up; its Chemistry of Common Life (Matador) is grounded in hardcore, and has hardness to spare, but makes its biggest impact when it lets a flute solo emerge from the tempest. With his basso profundo growl, singer Pink Eyes can sound like he’s gargling hot dogs, and harnessed to a song like "Black Albino Bones," with its cooing melody — the closest thing to pop the seven-year-old band has attempted — it makes for an unexpectedly moving juxtaposition. But the group’s real skill comes from mining the void left after the tribal affiliations of high school fall away; "Twice Born"<0x2009>‘s refrain, "Hands up if you think you’re the only one," could be the year’s Miranda July–esque rallying cry.
Also: if you’re wondering what Mick Barr’s been up to post-Ocrilim, the short answer, witnessed on Krallice‘s Krallice (Profound Lore) is black metal; Peasant (Level Plane), an all-encompassing slab of darkness by Baton Rouge–based Thou, is closer to trad sludge than to the transcendent drone of Sunn 0))), but no less impressively bleak.
SHOWS
The holiday season is not always a great time for shows (other than several Nutcracker incarnations), but for folks who want to gift live music this year there are plenty of sonic distractions. On the heels of Everybody (Thrill Jockey), its latest bout of sophisticated jazz rock, the eternally springlike Sea and Cake will make an appearance at Great American Music Hall just in time to counteract your seasonal affective disorder (Dec. 2, 8 p.m., $20). Sebastien Tellier rolls with the Daft Punk posse, so it’s no surprise that his music marries spot-on genre mimicry and a native sense of melody; check out the video for "Divine," in which the Beach Boys–meet–Lio jam turns into a global karaoke marathon of Tellier doppelgängers (Mezzanine, Dec. 4, 9 p.m., $15). There’s no rest for local workhorses Tussle and Jonas Reinhardt — they’ll be bringing their peculiar hot-cold takes on krauty electronics to the Hemlock Tavern (Dec. 6, 9:30 p.m., $7). And even if her music is not your cup of tea, Aimee Mann’s 3rd Annual Christmas Show should be a nice shot of seasonality in a city that tends to avoid big displays of Christmas spirit; consider it a good sign that Patton Oswalt, the stand-up comedian most deserving of your attention, will take part (Bimbo’s, Dec. 7, 8 p.m., $40). His looks call to mind a peripheral character from The Catcher in the Rye, and his preternaturally gentle music is specially designed not to hurt babies’ ears, but the earnest beauty of Jonathan Richman‘s songs might pierce your heart (Great American Music Hall, Dec. 7, 8 p.m., $15). Bearing a post-hardcore pedigree like whoa, San Francisco’s own Crime in Choir moves gracefully beyond its members’ backgrounds — At the Drive-In, the Fucking Champs — into (surprise!) instrumental prog territory (Hemlock Tavern, Dec. 13, 9:30 p.m., $6). *
PREVIEW Imagine the unsavory digs of the Mos Eisley Cantina of Tatooine stormed by a horde of previously barred droids and miscreants and forced to hold a variety show to stave off certain destruction — it’s a scene reminiscent of those generated by San Francisco’s OmniCircus, which has been simultaneously thrilling and troubling audiences for two decades. Founded by local surrealist artist and roboteer Frank Garvey, first as a film project, then as a live performance troupe, OmniCircus combines the high tech with the lowdown, propagating an environment where down-and-out robot performers and their human counterparts can come together under one roof, creating a spectacle part Transmetropolitan, part Captured! By Robots, and part The Black Rider. No mere vehicle for cream pies and contortionists, this darkly subversive one-ring circus has all the hallmarks of an ecstatically apocalyptic experience: music, mayhem, and mechanical mendicants. The Thousand Faces Ball marks the latest incarnation of the project, introducing the Moth nor Rust band starring OmniDiva Joan Loon, and retaining the talents of longtime DeusMachina collaborators, including Daniel Berkman and Geoffrey Pond, as well as an army of robotic riffraff: junkies, beggars, street preachers, and whores. Billed as the world’s first robotic theatre ensemble, OmniCircus is nevertheless no ephemeral vision of the future, but a thorough examination of the present through an unsentimental, yet curiously life-affirming lens.
THE THOUSAND FACES BALL Sat/8, 8 p.m., $10 donation. OmniCircus, 550 Natoma, SF.
It’s a combination that raised more than a few eyebrows: MC Hammer performing at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 8. We have it in our hearts to get country, but is this show for real? As it turns out, the connection is a fairly straightforward one. "I thought it was a very good idea since I’ve always been a very positive artist and always embraced the kids," Hammer, born Stanley Burrell, explained when I spoke to him by phone recently.
Hammer became involved with Hardly Strictly when a mutual acquaintance introduced him to festival benefactor Warren Hellman. He performs Oct. 3 during an educational program for children that is part of Daniel Pearl World Music Days. Founded in 2002 by the Daniel Pearl Foundation, Hammer is enthusiastic about his involvement in celebrating the memory of Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter killed in 2002 in Pakistan. "It is an honor to participate in anything that uplifts [Pearl’s] sacrifice and his commitment," he said. Add Hammer’s interest in community programs for children — he has sponsored Little League teams for more than a decade — and his appearance at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass becomes too legit for him to quit.
Just in case you think this is the extent of Hammer’s forays into the entertainment industry, think again. While the rest of us were building pages on Geocities.com, the artist formerly seen with resplendently large trousers was amassing an arsenal of tech knowledge. "Very quietly I got involved with tech all the way back in 1994," he said. "I was trying to figure out how to get my videos on the Internet." He visited firms like Silicon Graphics and Apple Computer, keeping an eye on QuickTime and similar applications, and now feels that video is finally ready to take center stage, describing it as "the main component of Web 2.0."
Thus the man who tried to teach Arsenio Hall to do the Chinese Typewriter is no longer simply a hip-hop artist: he has fashioned himself into an entrepreneur in high demand. Hammer has delivered a keynote speech at an Intel CEO summit, appeared on one expert panel at the TechCrunch20 Conference and yet another at the AlwaysOn and STVP conference at Stanford University — this one in the company of Chamillionaire and Mistah FAB. His connection to TechCrunch is notable, since its founder, Michael Arrington, has invested in Hammer’s company, DanceJam, an online community based around all types of dance. Users can upload videos of themselves to participate in battles, learn new dances using tutorials, or browse performances uploaded by users. "The ideas that I’ve had the chance to crystallize, and come up with content for and build communities around, those are the things that people are looking to do today," Hammer opined.
Considering Hammer’s deep immersion in the possibilities of contemporary pop culture and modern music, you might think the hip-hop artist’s appearance at a bluegrass festival would faze him. He laughed. "That’s why it’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass," he said. "I’ve got a song called ‘Help the Children.’ This is not new territory for me."
MC Hammer performs Fri/3, 11:30 a.m., for local students and the public on the Star Stage.
Who’s ready to get tingly with 85,000 freakazoids of affection? Multi-tentacled outdoor rave-a-thon LoveFest quickly approaches, a candy-colored octopus of sonic yummers. Oh, yes, there will be floats — as the parade twirls up Market Street and lands in the throbbing bass vortex of Civic Center Plaza. And in this, its fourth year, the LoveFest takes on a crucial mission: "We do not dance in the streets to escape the reality of our times. We dance to face them as a community, pointing the direction to a better way, set to beats and the full color of our expression," organizers say.
Can’t beat that with a bat. True to its kaleidoscopic intent, there’ll be scads of pre- and after-parties accompanying the 300 DJ–driven event. Below are a few keepers — you can find a ton more at the LoveFest Web site.
QOÖL LOVEFEST KICKOFF The longest-running weekly dance joint in San Francisco, Qoöl, starts the whole shebang with a strong evening dose of the classic San Francisco techno sound — deep but not too deep, clean but humorous, just right for "doing your thing." With DJs Alain Octavo, Syd Gris, Messiah, and Spesh. Wed/1, 5 p.m., $5. 111 Minna, SF. (415) 974-1719, www.qoolsf.com
PENDANA One of the "social action" parts of LoveFest — and a damn good-looking party to boot — benefiting NextAid.org, which helps African kids in need. With DJs Jeno, Lance DeSardi, Alland Byallo, the Staple Crew, and more. Thurs/2, 9:30 p.m., $10 with RSVP to events@nextaid.org. Supperclub, 657 Harrison, SF. (415) 348-0900, www.supperclub.com
DIRTYBIRD LOVEFEST PRE-PARTY Let your freak feathers fly early with SF’s current reigning dance label kings, minimal-goofy Dirty Bird Records, including Claude Von Stroke, Justin Martin, Worthy, and the aptly named Hookerz and Blow. Fri/3, 10 p.m., $20. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. (415) 625-8880, www.mezzaninesf.com
GET WEIRD The title says it all for this annual LoveFest event, as DJs Lee Burridge, Tim McCormack, and Mike Khoury get wiggy on the tables for a plethora of costumed weirdos — proud and loud, baby. Fri/3, 10 p.m., $20 advance. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. (415) 626-7001, www.getweirder.com, www.groovetickets.com
INFUSE — LOVE RULES! Underground burner beats behemoth Opel presents an uplifting after-LoveFest must for bouncy tech-funk and breakbeat heads, plus folks who like their bass floor-shattering. Prediction: fire twirlers and stilts, or at least what’s left of them at the end of the day. The UK’s elusive Elite Force make a special appearance. Sat/4, 10 p.m., $15 advance. Temple, 540 Howard, SF. www.templesf.com, www.groovetickets.com
THE MORNING AFTER THE LOVE Hangover, wha? No time for that — chill out on your fancy feet at the EndUp for a whole day of beats and no-end-in-sight freaks, with expansivist techno DJs Nikola Baytalo (one of our best right now), Three, Nikita, and about 50 others. Rave on! Sun/5, 6 a.m., $20 advance, EndUp, 401 Sixth St., SF. (415) 896-1095, www.theendup.com, www.groovetickets.com
Fourth Annual LoveFest begins Sat/4, noon, at Civic Center Plaza, SF. Donation requested. www.sflovefest.org
SUPER EGO "I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but I like it!" some hot soul shrieked at me outside the club. That’s totally my new self-affirmation T-shirt because, like, what’s with all the negative exacerbations in the world — not just in the shivery politisphere, but in the Zany Land of Nightlifez, too?
Most of my friends got canned from the Transfer so it could redirect itself, and 222 Club got sold so its fabulous owners could move on to bigger things — both unfortunate events that effectively ended a few of my fave parties and a lot of my free drinks. The Attack of Gargantuan Overpriced Ultralounges from Planet Douchebag Airbrushed Clothing continues, with three slated to open downtown by the end of the year. The great Steve Lady, the first Miss Trannyshack, passed away. And who isn’t packing a teeny pink dildo-shaped spritzer of mace in their Chrome clutch these days, what with all the violence after dark?
Life can sometimes seem like it dropped your bag in the toilet or shot your wolf from a plane. But then it’s time to spin around, put one slender hand on your one slender hip, yell "FAIL, motherfucker," and just own that shit like a kicky hairstyle. Give me back my wolf! Get me a new bag! Then call me a cab! I’m going to these parties.
HOT CHIPS
Now that Trannyshack has ended, the race to fill hostess Heklina’s humongous vacuum is on! (Ew.) In primed pole position is belovedly ditzy Cookie Dough, whose stubblebrity-studded drag implosion Monster Show (www.cookievision.tv) now splats its gender-clown intestines against the walls of Underground SF every Monday night. On Sept. 29, Miz Dough will throw a costume party laced with wrong/wrong performances to celebrate four years of … well … something. Who the hell knows what’s gonna happen, but it’ll be wearing fabric that hurts glaciers when it’s burned.
Oh yes, LoveFest comes gloriously upon us Oct. 4 (www.sflovefest.org), but there’ll be some real love going down at Supperclub the Thursday beforehand, when LoveFest pre-party Pendana — Swahili for "to love one another," duh — brings together a massive roster of well-known local DJs to benefit NextAid (www.nextaid.org), an LA joint that helps out African kids. Jenö from Back2Back, Kontrol’s Alland Byallo, Fil Latorre and Javaight from Staple, and a host of others will provide some juicy tech-house tunes. You bring the love and ducats.
Oct. 2, 9:30 p.m., $10 with RSVP to events@nextaid.org. Supperclub, 657 Harrison, SF. (415) 348-0900, www.supperclub.com
KUDUROS TO YOU
Last week in this very publication I wrote a sorta know-it-all article about the underground musical movements that have taken over US dance floors — but I must still be rolling down from that magic cap I chewed in ’02 since I forgot to mention the whole baile funk/electro-cumbia/digi-samba thing. Which is sad, because I adore it. Now it’s time to add kuduro — a faster, blippier, more air-horny version of baile funk originating in Angola — to the go-go global genre stew, as nuevo Latino electro party Tormenta Tropical teams up with disco sweethearts Body Heat to host a live blast from floor-thumping Portuguese kuduro kings Buraka Som Sistema (www.myspace.com/burakasomsistema). Also on tap: local fave-ravers Lemonade, who bring a brainy, rocky Brazilian twist to the bass bins. Muito louco!
GREEN CITY It’s hard to argue with Craig Nikitas when he says, "The greenest building is the one that exists now."
As a senior planner with the San Francisco Planning Department, Nikitas knows that a ton of energy is wasted tearing down the old and erecting the new. Energy embedded in the original materials and construction — which often last a century or longer — is also destroyed. And it all ends up in the dump, replaced by new products that might, if you’re lucky, hold up for a fraction of the lifetime of the old components.
Michael Tornabene is a designer at Page and Turnbull, Inc., a Nob Hill District architecture firm specializing in preserving historic buildings, notably the asbestos-laden Old Mint and the Ferry Building. He said the Bay Area is distinguished by its thousands of gorgeous Victorian, Edwardian, and Craftsman homes, as well as its green sentiment. Restoring old buildings can be tricky because their features aren’t standardized. Even so, their age can also be their best virtue.
"What’s great about sustainable upgrades to an historic home is most of the historic homes we’re dealing with were constructed before a mechanically integrated system was developed," Tornabene said, noting most pre-1950s structures already had nice green features such as passive solar orientation, designed into them rather than being built around unsustainable elements — think air conditioning — that are harder to green.
Where to start? First, pick off what Tom Dufurrena, a principal at Page and Turnbull, calls "all the low-hanging fruit — the easy things that have the least cost and the most benefit." Weather-stripping the doors and those rattling old windows, insuutf8g the attic (40 percent of heat is lost through the roof, he said), and replacing old, inefficient appliances with Energy Star models are the three simplest and best historic home improvements. All are noninvasive and energy conscious, and they don’t require a permit from the city.
Such suggestions were just the beginning of measures photographer Peter Bruce took to make his family’s 117-year-old Upper Haight Victorian more efficient and comfortable. Over a five year period, they knocked their monthly electric bill from $250 to $160 by replacing their refrigerator, installing a dishwasher that recycles heated water, and putting in nearly 100 percent efficient hot water heaters.
But Bruce didn’t ignore the low-tech, remembering to string a clothesline and using curtains as more than mere decoration. "Dark, heavy curtains make a world of difference," he said, explaining that they hung these over north- and east-facing windows to keep the rooms toasty. He put sheer, light-colored curtains over west windows to allow in afternoon warmth.
Curtains or no, windows are the controversial linchpin in any discussion of building preservation and sustainability. "There’s almost the knee-jerk reaction from a sustainability point of view to replace your windows with double-paned windows," Dufurrena said. "On an historic building, if the windows are a historic feature — which they almost inevitably will be — then there’s an issue right there with compromising the integrity of the building."
Old window frames are made from higher-quality materials — in San Franciscan Victorians this often means rare first-growth redwood — than most modern energy-efficient alternatives. The National Trust for Historic Preservation cites studies showing it could take a century or longer for a replacement window, typically made of toxic vinyl, energy-intensive aluminum, or a wood composite, to pay for itself in energy savings.
"The worst thing you can do is take out old wood windows and throw them away and replace them with vinyl," Nikitas said.
He said that when Sup. Aaron Peskin was working on the Green Building Ordinance last year, the big question was how to create incentives encouraging people to reuse historic buildings. They devised a system awarding points toward their mandated green building requirement for retaining historic features, and keeping the windows represents a big chunk of the points.
"It’s about the truth of the building and the preservation ethos," said Cara Bertron, Page and Turnbull’s cultural resources specialist. "Those are really hard things to articulate to people who may see the energy savings as worth it."
For more information, including details on upcoming events on greening historic homes, visit www.aiasf.org and www.builditgreen.org.
Almost every San Francisco car owner has had this experience at least once: you parked at a metered or timed spot, and now you’re running late. You rush back to your vehicle only to find a uniformed official already filling out your parking ticket. Now you’re pissed — at yourself, your car, the city’s rules, and the person holding the notepad. On some level you know the parking official is simply doing her job — it’s nothing personal. But on a more visceral level, you’re seething with resentment, and it’s directed squarely at her. Glancing at the ticket that’ll cost you more than this week’s groceries, you want to ask, "How can you sleep at night?"
I recently went through this experience twice in one week. And once I got past the automatic hatred of all uniforms, three-wheeled vehicles, and notepads with carbon copies, I began to wonder what it would be like to have a job most people don’t want you to do.
I got to thinking: not everyone can be an urban hero — those professionals who, because of the nature of their jobs, are considered benevolent and necessary. They put out our fires, save our lives, and teach our children how to read. No, some people are urban antagonists. They call during dinner time. They interrupt your picnic at the park. They write parking tickets.
I wanted to talk to some of these people, to find out not only just how badly they’re treated, but also why they continue to show up for work, day after day. It turned out it can be so hard to have these kinds of jobs that most parking control officers wouldn’t even talk to me. And none I interviewed would give me a real name.
But they did give me some insight.
‘SORRY, I ALREADY STARTED WRITING.’
With their uniforms, handheld ticket-gadgets, and ubiquitous three-wheeled vehicles, there are few professionals more recognizable on San Francisco streets than the Parking Control officers. And with 44 recorded incidents involving angry motorists threatening or assaulting officers in the course of performing their duties over the past two years, few professionals are subject to such acute on-the-job stress.
"It’s tough sometimes," acknowledged B., a PCO writing tickets near the intersection of Valencia and César Chávez streets, "because you’re doing your job and a lot of the time people see you as the opposition — like an enemy, not as someone who is doing a service to the city." People forget that by writing tickets, PCOs crack down on double-parkers who block traffic, space-hoggers who stay in one spot all day, and sidewalk-parkers who obstruct walkways for pedestrians such as mothers with strollers, B. said.
But not all PCOs take comfort in that rationalization. K., another anonymous PCO, said, "You just need to find your niche. I respond to complaints — blocked driveways, construction zones, fire hydrant obstructions — I’m happy. It’s cool."
"It’s not for everybody, but I would say it’s a fine job," he continued. "It pays well. It’s secure. I’ve been doing this for 10 years and I’ve never had a problem. If you’re cool about it, if you’ve got the right demeanor, then the saying is true: you get what you give."
Judson True, a spokesman for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, added that PCOs conduct traffic during special events and congested hours, help motorists around accident sites, and even conduct undercover stings to prevent the abuse of disabled parking placards. Most of all, though, PCOs — like others with less-than-lovable jobs — are still people.
"No one likes to get parking tickets. That’s an obvious reality," True said. "But people need to remember that the parking control officers are their neighbors, their friends, their family — people who are doing an important job for the whole city."
‘CAN YOU SPARE A MOMENT FOR THE ENVIRONMENT?’
Yes, those clipboard jockeys scanning for eye-contact outside Whole Foods or approaching you at Dolores Park have a name. They’re called canvassers, and their job is to solicit votes, subscriptions, opinions, or something similar — and often they’re paid by the signature. These days canvassers are talking about everything from orphans to Obama, gun control to global warming. But most people aren’t interested in what they’re called or what issue they’re representing.
"I’ve been called pariah, douchebag, whore, woman of the night," said Valerie, who recently canvassed at Market and Powell streets for an international charity. "I’ve had coffee poured on me. I’ve had people scream ‘Get the fuck out of my face!’ and yell ‘It’s a scam! It’s a scam!’ while I talk with other people."
Dave, a canvasser for Progressive Political Solutions who worked further down Market, agreed the job can be challenging — but worth it.
"There are going to be days that people are totally against everything you do," Dave said. "But then there’s someone — one person — who makes the day worthwhile, someone who I would have never been able to talk to in an office."
Dave was enthusiastic about the skills he has developed working the streets. He not only credited canvassing for PPS with enhancing his verbal and interpersonal skills, but also with learning industry-specific skills like how to do press calls and conferences, and understanding the political process. Within months of taking the job, he said, he had risen to staff supervisor, helping to advise and manage new hires.
"I like this job in the sense of the big picture," Dave said, before heading into a crowded UN Plaza, clipboard in hand.
Valerie confirmed that for canvassers, the big picture is what it’s all about. Valerie, no less positive for being verbally assaulted and doused with coffee, added, "At the end of the day — no matter how many times someone calls me a douchebag or a bitch — I am making someone’s life better. That’s what really matters to me."
‘SORRY TO CALL YOU AT DINNERTIME, BUT … ‘
Kurt Stenzel, vice president of sales at Tactical TeleSolutions, was one of the few people I interviewed who gave me a full name. Then again, he swears his salespeople aren’t the same ones interrupting your primetime TV hour — and he credits telemarketing for his meteoric rise to success.
"I took the Greyhound bus from New York City with $200, got a telemarketing job, and one thing led to another and now I’m selling to big tech guys [Apple, IBM, Sprint] every day," said Stenzel, who runs the call station downtown.
Though TTS mainly does business-to-business work, Stenzel explained, most telemarketers do make cold calls to homes at some point. His was in New York, where he worked in a windowless room calling people who didn’t want to hear from him.
Their attitude, he says, was, "You’re trying to rip me off — now prove otherwise."
"It’s a tough go," he admitted. "People will curse you out or be crazy."
So what’s good about this job? According to Stenzel, it’s how egalitarian the hiring process is. Call stations aren’t interested in padded resumes and flashy degrees. They want people who know how to talk, plain and simple.
"If they’re articulate, it doesn’t matter so much if they’ve got the right degree," he said. "In that sense, call center work is one of those genuine equal opportunity situations. If people have dropped out of school or come on a tough time, people can come here, build up some skills, and really build their way up."
Though these interviews were enlightening, I can’t say I want to do any of these jobs any more than I did before. And I can’t promise to be less annoyed the next time a canvasser butts into my private conversation or a PCO ruins my morning. But I do hope I’m at least a little more compassionate.
Of course, compassion would be so much easier, officer, if you just let me go. Just this once.
Now that I’m postmenopausal, I’m worried about how I can get some orthopedic support in our bedroom to make "amore" easier. My arms and back are injured from overuse and wear and tear. I really think about the garage door-opener rig in the movie 9 to 5. Is there something like that hoist that is available for home use? I think this would work great. A friend suggests a sky-chair. What can we do? Grab bars are out since there isn’t a door nearby. Thanks for any help you can offer. I’m not dead yet.
Love,
Ouchy
Dear Ouchy:
Oh, dear. I hear you about the overuse and wear and tear — at some level I simply don’t believe we were meant to last this long, any more than my pampered, heavily medicated house cat was "meant" to still be alive and scratching at 21. Still, merely making it past menopause ought not to doom you to a life of pain and infirmity. Promise me you have seen some doctors and physical therapists and a teacher of some school of gentle and not-too-ridiculous yoga, and I will tell you what I know about assistive devices, which is plenty. Do we have a deal?
Starting on the lower-cost, lower-tech, and lower-to-the-ground options, I have often mentioned "sex pillows" and I will mention them again. You can buy fancy ramps and humpty-things from a company such as Liberator Adventure Gear, whose unintentionally hilarious Web site features apparent Chippendales rejects and their female counterparts posing awkwardly on big foam hummocks that would not look out of place in an ’80s loft-space complete with black leather coffee tables and Nagel prints on the wall. If you can’t deal with that level of retro, you can get foam ramps and donuts and the like from a medical supply company. They won’t come in colors (especially not "premium" colors), but you’re just going to throw a towel over them anyway.
Next we have stand-alone swings and slings. These do not operate on garage-door frequencies, but I’m not sure how good an idea mechanization is anyway. I keep imagining bits and parts getting snagged and hoisted against their will. Plus, while your neighbor may not hit the garage door opener and cause your … something … to go up, I did find a story about an English guy with a Turkish-made erectile implant that responded enthusiastically to a neighbor’s remote, and I’m not Snopesing it. Call me Fox Mulder: I Want to Believe.
There are dozens of swinglike devices made specifically for your purpose (well, not for the creaky and painful of joint, but for suspending a receptive partner in the air, hopefully above the insertive one). You could check out the jauntily-titled justaswinging.com; it carries a full range of swings. These devices are ugly (and the site itself, in sharp contrast to Liberator Adventure Whatsit, looks like the photographer set up shop in the bathroom of a San Fernando Valley furnished apartment and covered whatever he didn’t want in the shot with used bedsheets), but what do you want for $425? That will get you the Effortless model, which not only has a packable, hideable frame for vacations and visits from relatives, it even has a remote for raising, lowering, and possibly swiveling. That oughta solve your garage-door itch right there.
For considerably more money and even less aesthetic appeal, but with a degree of sturdiness and whoops!-lessness I cannot guarantee for a purpose-made sex swing, there are those devices made for lifting a disabled or infirm person in and out of bed. You don’t need any sort of special license to order one of these — or most medical equipment, really (didn’t Tom Cruise buy Katie her own ultrasound machine?). All you need is a charge card. A good charge card, though, because they’re not cheap. You’d need to order something like a "Sani-sling," too, if you think the problem through, and that will set you back another $400 or $500.
Forget that. You’re going to do better in the sex world than in the medical world. The sites may be sleazy and the devices may not be something you’d want either your parents or your kids to see, but the medical versions would require just as much explanation (since you’re not actually disabled, just a little rickety), be twice as ugly, and cost twice as much. I am all for getting the best-designed, toughest gear you can afford (our kids are outfitted as much or more by REI than they are by Babies "R" Us), but there’s such a thing as overkill. And anyway, buying medical supplies is kind of depressing unless you’re, you know, into that. Stick with the swings and slings. They’re the right tools for the job, although anything’s better than hooking yourself up to the garage door. Aren’t you glad you asked?
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.
SONIC REDUCER Def Leppard and Nickelback: you know I want my fantasy, and everyone is aware of how those cool, desirable, shocking, or subversive photographs are integral to fanning the flames of so many rock ‘n’ roll clowns’ dreamscapes. But it’s those moments when a picture delivers more than words that have inspired some to pick up a camera and keep shooting. Local noise-punk photog Lars Knudson can verify this, concerning one Arab on Radar show at Bottom of the Hill back at the turn of the millennium. "I saw this band Pink and Brown, and this audience of people who were absolute freaks, ultra-nerd ‘tards, hipsters, scenesters, or whatever you want to call it, and I felt so alive and so at home," Knudson recalls today from his work as a chef in San Carlos. "I tried to describe it to everyone I worked with, and they looked at me like, ‘Huh?’ Then I stumbled on these images that were taken by Virgil Porter [Burn My Eye] and showed them to people, and they said, ‘ooh!’"
As SF photographer Peter Ellenby [Every Day Is Saturday (Chronicle)] testifies, Jim Marshall put the Bay on the map for music photography and shooters like Jay Blakesberg have kept it there. But what about the newbs — armed with the latest digi point-and-shoot and inspired, à la Knudson, to begin capturing a fragment of the sound and the fury? Around the same instant everyone began to believe they could be a DJ, so too did all and sundry start to assume that they could also be an ace lens swinger.
John Vanderslice: Photo by Peter Ellenby
So how does one carve out a name as a music photog when the glut of images on Flickr and assorted photoblogs threatens to overwhelm? I gathered snippets of sage advice from a few area rock photogs: Knudson, Ellenby, and Debra Zeller, who honed her craft focusing on local indie combos via her Playing in Fog online project and concert series, has since expanded into professional wedding photography (originally shooting the nuptials of the Red Thread’s Jason Lakis), and currently books live music at the Make-Out Room.
•Be a music lover, foremost. "That’s why I did photography part-time for so long — it’s really hard to make a living in music photography," says Zeller (www.playinginfog.com, www.dazrocks.com), who has shot Cat Power, among others, at the behest of their labels. "What magazines pay is absolutely ridiculous and getting the work is another challenge." Additionally, Knudson says, "Part of the reason I have good photos is I know when they’re going to rock out. If you’re not prepared to get lost in the moment, you should go home and be an artist, because it isn’t about you and what you got that night, it’s really about what the band did onstage that night." In the spirit of shareware and the scene he has documented, Knudson makes thousands of his images freely available to bands — and really anyone — on a not-for-profit basis at www.pbase.com/pistolswing.
•Show everyone your work. "I showed my photos to as many people as possible," says Ellenby (www.ellenby.com), who photo-edited zines like Snackcake and Devil in the Woods. "All the bands and my friends knew I was for hire, and you have to not be afraid to be take criticism and set goals. When I was starting out my favorite band was Overwhelming Colorfast, and my goal was to shoot them, and Bob Reed would rip on them all the time."
Elliott Smith: Photo by Debra Zeller
•Know the craft, natch. "I think it’s important to shoot in manual and really know how to work your camera," Zeller insists. "That’s how you get the images. If you just rely on program mode, chances are you’ll be lucky to get a couple of good shots."
•"Don’t be afraid to work for a six-pack," advises Ellenby, who cofounded tech company GeoVector and is currently working on a Joe Strummer photo project. "Don’t think it’s your road to riches, either — especially if you like indie music. I would make more money if I wanted to, but I don’t like working for a giant music corporation. I like it better when I’m working one-on-one for a band — when you’re hired by a band you can let the creativity flow."
•"My only other piece of advice is, shut up and push the button," Knudson says. "When you’re shooting live bands, you’re going to miss the shot if you’re busy telling your friend how cool you are."
I CAN GO FOR THAT
SON AMBULANCE
Dulcet Midwestern pop-smiths take on Someone Else’s Déjà Vu (Saddle Creek). Wed/6, 9 p.m., $8. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com
FUTURE BLONDES AND C.L.A.W.S.
Malevolent Houston beats call up the ground-control SF bass-meister. With Skozey Fetisch. Thurs/7, 9 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
ME FIRST AND THE GIMME GIMMES
Punk supergroupers grope classic hits anew with Have Another Ball! (Fat Wreck Chords). Sat/9–Sun/10, 8 p.m. $15. Parkside, 1600 17th St., SF. www.theeparkside.com
PROJEKT REVOLUTION
A revolution in rock-hip-hop pairings begins with Linkin Park, Chris Cornell, Bravery, Ashes Divide, Busta Rhymes, Hawthorne Heights, and Street Drum Corps. Sat/9, 2 p.m., $34–$77. Shoreline Amphitheatre, 1 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View. www.ticketmaster.com
I’m in my 20s, I’ve had a few partners, I masturbate fairly frequently (since childhood), and I have no hang-ups that I can identify. In fact, I enjoy having sex as often as possible (usually more often than my partners can keep up with). However, I don’t think I can orgasm. I have no problems enjoying sex, and I can feel myself building up to an orgasm, but just at the point where it feels like I may reach the peak and crest over, suddenly everything just ebbs away and fizzles out. What gives?
Love,
Going Nowhere
Dear Going:
You too? I had a bunch of these questions this year, but I don’t think there’s any sort of trendy "no orgasms are the new orgasms" thing going on here. I think the orgasmless female sexual experience is with us always. And due to the cosmic joke part wherein our most sensitive bits ended up outside while most of our partners are driven to lodge themselves inside, I don’t expect this phenomenon to go away anytime soon.
You, though — are you saying you don’t come from masturbation either, even though you diligently practice like a good girl? That is frustrating! And it tells me that despite a professed lack of hang-ups, you are likely just not comfortable — sorry for the dismal cliché but there is no better way to say this — "letting go." It’s truly unlikely that you lack the capacity — that just doesn’t happen much with young, healthy women. What does happen is fear, inhibition, and "spectatoring," or allowing oneself to be distracted from the moment by wondering what one looks like or what one’s partner (even imaginary ones) is thinking of one’s performance, and so on. As I mentioned the last time (see "Going solo," 02/20/2008), one of the best sources for exercises aimed at getting one’s inner critic to STFU is Julia Heiman and Joseph LoPiccolo’s Becoming Orgasmic (Prentice Hall, 2003), although there are tons of similar resources out there.
There are also tools available that simply didn’t exist when pioneering works like Becoming Orgasmic‘s original 1980s version were being written — and by "tools" I don’t mean coping skills and so on, as referenced by therapists and therapy geeks. I mean tools that use batteries or alternating current. Some of the stuff out there now is just mind-blowingly efficient, so much the right tools for the job that they practically dare you not to come. Try something in the way of the Rabbit Pearl or one of its many descendants, any of these things that rotate, undulate, buzz, flicker, dice, puree, and frappé. Then see if you’re still having a problem.
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
My ex-boyfriend was able to give me multiple orgasms, usually using his hands. I mean real, one-after-the-other, sometimes three or four in 60 seconds. I haven’t been able to replicate this myself and I haven’t found anyone else who has quite the same effect on me. I miss it. Do you have any advice? I’m sure there’s no foolproof way to recreate this experience — step one, step two, presto! — but any tips from you or your readers would be welcome.
Love,
Miss the Multiple
Dear Miss:
Foolproof, no, but quite reliable, certainly. Just because you have not shared the above writer’s frustrations does not mean you can’t share her prescription: high-tech sex toys, the kind with something that goes in and something that stays out and various things that go ’round and ’round.
My favorite sex toy vendor, for no real reason other than that it is local to me and staffed with friendly nerdy chicks who can write a decent sentence and test everything before considering carrying it on the site, is Blowfish.com. And while you don’t have to shop there, you should certainly give its Web site a look. The "luxury toys" section is especially fun — even if you don’t want to spend $119, isn’t "The Cone" fascinating? It’s just a pink silicone, well, cone with a 16-function motor, and I suspect it may exude "come to me" pheromones like the similar-looking pink jelly monsters in erotic science fiction are wont to do. (They then enslave you and breed in you and you die, but that’s another story.) It even has an "orgasm button" (isn’t the whole thing an orgasm button?) for the impatient.
Then there’s the Eroscillator, which I love because it sounds and looks like something a bearded, dispassionate 19th-century physician might have used to solicit nervous paroxysm from hysterical housewives.
It also carries less rarified and less expensive options, of course, all of which are rather remarkable examples of modern and mostly Japanese engineering. And I can pretty well promise there was nothing your boyfriend could do with his hands that these can’t do with their … parts. Admittedly, however, they don’t love you. Is that part of the equation necessary, do you think?
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.
TECHSPLOITATION I’ve been writing this column for nine years. I was here with you through the dot-com boom and the crash. I made fun of the rise of Web 2.0 when that was called for, and screamed about digital surveillance under the USA-PATRIOT Act when that was required (actually, that’s still required). I’ve ranted about everything from obscenity law to genetic engineering, and I’ve managed to stretch this column’s techie mandate to include meditations on electronic music and sexology. Every week I gave you my latest brain dump, even when I was visiting family in Saskatchewan or taking a year off from regular journalism work to study at MIT.
But now it’s time for me to move on. This is my last Techsploitation column, and I’m not going to pretend it’s not a sad time for me. Writing this column was the first awesome job I got after fleeing a life of adjunct professor hell at UC Berkeley. I was still trying to figure out what I would do with my brain when Dan Pulcrano of the Silicon Valley Metro invited me out for really strong martinis at Blondie’s Bar in the Mission District and offered me a job writing about tech workers in Silicon Valley. My reaction? I wrote a column about geeks doing drugs and building insanely cool shit at Burning Man. I felt like the hipster survivalist festival was the only event that truly captured the madness of the dot-com culture I saw blooming and dying all around me. I can’t believe Dan kept me on, but he did.
Since then, my column also found a home in the Guardian and online at Alternet.org, two of the best leftist publications I’ve ever had the honor to work with. I’ve always believed the left needed a strong technical wing, and I’ve tried to use Techsploitation to articulate what exactly it would mean to be a political radical who also wants to play with tons of techie consumerist crap.
There are plenty of libertarians among techie geeks and science nerds, but it remains my steadfast belief that a rational, sustainable future society must include a strong collectivist vision. We should strive to use technologies to form communities, to make it easier for people to help the most helpless members of society. A pure free-market ideology only leads to a kind of oblivious cruelty when it comes to social welfare. I don’t believe in big government, but I do believe in good government. And I still look forward to the day when capitalism is crushed by a smarter, better system where everyone can be useful and nobody dies on the street of a disease that could have been prevented by a decent socialized health care system.
So I’m not leaving Techsploitation behind because I’ve faltered in my faith that one day my socialist robot children will form baking cooperatives off the shoulder of Saturn. I’m just moving on to other mind-ensnaring projects. Some of you may know that I’ve become the editor of io9.com, a blog devoted to science fiction, science, and futurism. For the past six months I’ve been working like a maniac on io9, and I’ve also hired a kickass team of writers to work with me. So if you want a little Techsploitation feeling, be sure to stop by io9.com. We’re there changing the future, saving the world, and hanging out in spaceships right now.
I also have another book project cooking in the back of my brain, so when I’m not blogging about robots and post-human futures, I’m also writing a book-length narrative about, um, robots and post-human futures. Also pirates.
The past nine years of Techsploitation would have been nothing without my readers, and I hope you can picture me with tears in my eyes when I write that. I’ve gotten so many cool e-mails from you guys over the years that they’ve filled my heart forever with glorious, precise rants about free software, digital liberties, sex toys, genetic engineering, copyright, capitalism, art, video games, science fiction, the environment, and the future — and why I’m completely, totally wrong about all of them. I love you dorks! Don’t ever stop ruthlessly criticizing everything that exists. It is the only way we’ll survive.
Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who is slowly working on fixing her broken WordPress install at www.techsploitation.com, so eventually you’ll be able to keep up with her there again.
Favianna Rodriguez is from Oakland and she lives there today. She is the co-editor, along with Josh MacPhee, of Reproduce and Revolt: A Graphic Toolbox for the 21st Century Activist (Soft Skull Press, 192 pages, $19.95). On the eve of the book’s release party, she recently spoke about the project’s origins, forging connections between groups and the Bay Area’s role in activist art.
Cover of Reproduce and Revolt
SFBG:Even in the socially conscious art world, it’s usually men who get the most spotlight.So, first of all, I want to give you props for raising the profile of so many radical womyn artists with this book. Can you tell me about any challenges or goals specifically related to gender issues that you had with this project?
Favianna Rodriguez: I’m a first generation woman of color. My parents were immigrants. So it was very important to me for the book to represent not just women, but women of color. We’ve got lots of artists from Mexico, Peru, Colombia and Argentina in this book.
My co-editor, Josh MacPhee, is a white male – he’s cool, very anti-racist – but he understood that with a project like this, which involves getting global artists to submit royalty-free art, it was very important to have a woman of color in a leadership position. Of course, the political art world is male-dominated, so some of the sections, especially the “war and peace” chapter, were overwhelmingly male, and we really had to work on creating the balance of perspectives that we wanted [throughout the book].
But women of color aren’t the only ones that are generally under-represented – black men are another example. This book is just the first phase. We’re just getting started, because we’ve got a good selection of Latin American artists [featured in the book], but we want to expand to include more Asian and African artists with the next editions. It’s all about building networks.
SFBG:What inspired you to start this project? FR: Josh was collecting graphics and I’d been talking with Bay Area women artists about doing something like this, so we decided to merge our projects. I wanted to make it a multilingual project and I brought in tech people so we could make this all happen online. This book was totally compiled and edited online. We did artist authorization documents and design and had political discussions online.
The book has over 300 images from 12 countries, and the Web site that will launch on July 1 is also going to be bilingual. It’s going to have all the graphics in high-resolution, available for download, because nobody wants to scan images anymore if they don’t have to.
TECHSPLOITATION I’m surrounded by people who think the world is changing because Amazon released an e-book reader called the Kindle and because Apple released a new, cheaper iPhone that supposedly will run faster. Really, just search for "3G iPhone" and you’ll see, like, thousands of articles raving about the Second Coming of iPhone. Are these technologies transforming our lives forever, or has the whole idea of world-changing technology finally become nothing more than an advertising jingle?
You can get the answer, in part, from a normally staid engineering journal called IEEE Spectrum. This month Spectrum did a special issue on "the singularity," a term from science fiction that refers to the moment when the technology and culture of the present evolve to the point that they would be incomprehensible to people from the past (www.spectrum.ieee.org/singularity). Airplanes, for example, would be a singularity technology for people from the 1700s. None of the brainiacs and visionaries writing for Spectrum have much to say about e-book readers or mobile phones that play music.
That’s because the Kindle and the iPhone actually represent the death throes of 20th-century technology. They are not changing the world; they are putting a new interface on yesterday’s innovations. When you want to evaluate whether a piece of tech really is "revolutionary," just put it to the simple singularity acid test. Ask yourself if you could explain it in a few sentences to people living 100 years ago. So let’s sit down with your typical resident of San Francisco in 1908, and explain Kindle and iPhone to her.
First the Kindle: "This mechanical instrument allows you to read every book in your library by pressing these levers." Our 1908 San Franciscan may be startled that she can read so many books with one instrument, but does she intuitively get the idea? Yes. Now let’s give her an iPhone. "This artful device is a combination phonograph and telephone that you can slip into the sleeves of your jacket for safekeeping." Again, she’s going to be startled by the size and shape of this artful device, but she’s seen phonographs and she’s used telephones before. Will she go into a state of catatonic future shock? No. She’ll slide that baby up her lacy sleeve and call her friend while shopping for records and mass-produced books on Market Street.
The Kindle and iPhone are the end-state and convergence of technologies developed, for the most part, in the 19th century. The only element inherent in both devices that I think might throw our 1908 woman for a loop is the Internet. One could certainly explain that it is like a giant repository of newspapers, but of course that isn’t quite right. Nor is it shops, or notes and scribbles on walls, or storytelling, or pictures or phone calls. It isn’t even really a convergence of all of those things: it is something genuinely new, socially and technologically.
But adding our era’s one singularity-level technology to 100-year-old technologies does not make more singularity technology. It’s like electrifying a device that was once driven by steam. Upgrades are not the same thing as paradigm shifts.
If you want to know what kinds of technologies really will transform our lives, you need to think about things we take for granted that would be hard to explain to our 1908 person — or indeed, to a 1978 person: Internet technologies. Global positioning system technologies. Space-going technologies. (Though pretty much anybody in 1908 would get the idea of robots on Mars — "mechanical creatures on Mars" sounds like a 19th-century sci-fi novel.) Most of all, look to technologies that are changing social relationships the way the Internet has. Sites like Facebook are literally changing the way we understand friendship. Our culture would be incomprehensible to the people of 1908 just due to the rate at which we exchange knowledge online — passing around the "dramatic lemur" video to millions of people in a day, for example.
Oh, now you want to see it? Search for "dramatic lemur." Try explaining that to our 1908 friend.
Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who has no interest whatsoever in the iPhone because she’s waiting for her augmented reality lenses with the blink interface.
REVIEW Does anyone still truly abide by the hope that technology is the benevolent force that can deliver a luminous future? Sure, we’ve got biotech, greentech, and Web 2.0 to tackle disease, our environmental sins, social alienation, and economic downturn. But at the same time, who isn’t aware of the corporate capitalist machinery and toxic waste that will accompany the next Apple marvel or Monsanto-engineered miracle crop? Can a Silicon Valley researcher really find a way to reverse global warming?
We all hope for, and perhaps believe in, that miracle cure. It’s a way to generate optimism, however slight. This is the cultural condition that serves as the thematic starting point of "Superlight," the San Jose Museum of Art exhibition component of the second biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge, a technology-focused series of live events, most held June 4-8. The show, curated by Steve Dietz, and the festival are rooted historically in what may be called electronic and digital art, but "Superlight" finds thematic inspiration in the more generally pervasive, free-floating anxieties of our greenhouse gas–warmed psychic atmosphere: environmental and economic meltdowns, food shortages, personal disappointments, and the like. Recognizing that most of these conditions are brought about by the same technological advancements that are looked to for ways of stabilizing if not rectifying those conditions, Dietz presents a couple dozen solo and collaborative artists not as saviors, but as people who can "aerate and illuminate" our contemporary concerns.
It’s no accident that the show presents a range of media, not all of it plugged in, and much of it formed with hybridized materials and approaches. If the digital art genre was not so long ago equated with computer screens and chirping electronic soundtracks — don’t worry, you’ll find some of that here, and in Second Life corollaries to some pieces — the atmosphere of the galleries suggests analog objects and psychological positions that aerate some of that virtual space.
It happens in a delightfully literal manner in Taiwanese artist Shih Chieh Huang’s perversely adorable robotic creatures made from plastic bags, water bottles, and electric fans. The sculptures gracefully appear to breathe as the bags fill and evacuate, and they have light components that glow in the heightened colors of late model car dashboards. The vibe is more troubling in psychologically tinted — and somewhat glitchy — interactive works such as Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Global Mind Radar/Reader (an Emotional Barometer), which takes a cultural pulse as a female figure, projected inside a glass dome "blogosphere," goes through a series of emotional gestures responding to live blog input concerning current events. That position is echoed in Bruce Charlesworth’s installation Love Disorder, which is tartly described in exhibition text: "A huge projected video character has ambivalent feelings about you." And he’s not shy about expressing them. These works use anthropomorphism to generate identification with the machinery, though the latter two tout complex, glitch-friendly technology that dare us to believe, or at least question, if they actually work.
Mixed emotions also infuse Daniel Faust’s elegantly composed and slightly wistful color photographs of now-historic Silicon Valley corporate architecture and outmoded data archives, depicting them as stately yet oddly humble. The images are visually skewed toward a modernist history via research facility. That kind of past idealism is perhaps behind the utopian-themed collaborative projects by Free Soil and Red 76, which tap into a pervasive yearning for utopian endeavors, both on earth and Second Life sediment. These works, however, find their most vital components outside the museum — in tours and social gatherings — and their diagrams and historical artifacts are more confusing than illuminating.
More insistent is the video documentation of projects by HeHe (Helen Evans and Hieko Hansen), a pair of Paris designers who harness carbon-filled industrial pollution, second-hand smoke, and various light sources to urge us to look at the world, and the amazing possibilities in available hardware and software, with an uneasy sense of wonder. From a literal standpoint, their pieces fit this exhibition’s premise best: their use of illumination resembles a technologically fortified nature that manages to inspire as it metaphorically sticks our noses in holes in the ozone. If that’s not superlight, what is?
Nearly ten years after boutique New York bakeries and Carrie Bradshaw brought the lil’ cupper into the spotlight, it’s probably safe to say cupcakes have jumped the shark. Now you can find a cupcake novelty T-shirt in every clothing store, but you’re lucky to spot a nice simple brownie in the bakery case at the local coffee shop. If anyone would be sensitive to this overexposure, I’d think it would be trend-obsessed tech taste-makers, which is why CupcakeCamp — last Sunday’s bake-off for the 2.0 crowd — came as something of a surprise. This isn’t exactly the crowd I’d think of when I think of “cupcake people.”
So when I decided to go, I had an inkling of what I was getting into. But I truly wanted to believe that CupcakeCamp was just the sort of thing an earnest cupcaking socialist like me would like.
I push off and head down a makeshift plywood runway, compressing as I roll over the edge and into the Technicolor graffiti of the drainage ditch. The transition between the banked wall and the flatbottom has an abrupt kink in it, enough to send you to your face if you’re caught sleeping. I take some weight off the front end and try to maintain my speed as I pump into the opposite corner and carve the far end of the ditch where there’s an over-45-degree wall that runs behind what my friends and I call the "death pit" — a gaping cutaway in the bottom of the culvert, five feet deep, filled with broken glass, and frequently used as a urinal. Since I’m at the apex of my backside carve, up a wall 10 feet above last week’s Miller Time, I’m jolted by the crackle of a loudspeaker:
"You are trespassing. Leave the area at once or you will be arrested."
My concentration shot by the sheriff’s announcement, I jump off my deck and over the chasm at the base of the bank, barely clearing the skater’s version of a Vietnam tiger pit, and land on the rough concrete beyond the edge. My board bullets straight in, though, so I’ve got to lower myself — gingerly — into the mostly dry detritus and rescue it before my friends and I jet out of the spot and into the manicured back nine of Pleasanton’s Castlewood golf course. We get to the car, throw the boards in the trunk — mine has a "Skateboarding Is Not a Crime" sticker on the bottom — and head to the next spot, a ditch called the Rat Trap.
The year is 1987. I’m 16, in high school, and living with my parents in Fremont. The scene plays out over and over in much the same way: a drainage ditch, a nicely painted curb or ledge at a shopping center, the occasional backyard pool, and night sessions at the Tar Banks, a set of embankments around a loading dock with curbs at the top. It’s an underground railroad of repurposed architecture, none of it designed with a skateboard in mind but all of it highly skateable.
Taking the $4.7mil Cunningham skatepark. Video by Jarrod Allen, www.jarrodallen.com
Every weekend my crew hits as many spots as we can, and the constants shape up like this: urethane, aluminum, Canadian hard rock maple, concrete, and asphalt. Maybe blood, maybe beer — we’re teenagers after all — but nearly always: cops.
Skateboarding may not be a crime, but it sure as hell feels like one.
Flash forward 20 years. I’m with a different crew as I pull onto a street in suburban Redwood City, and I’m no longer rollin’ in my mom’s Plymouth Sundance, but my own truck. The other thing that’s changed is the number of wheels per head. There are four heads to eight wheels, and we’re here to ride the Phil Shao Memorial Skatepark. On bikes.
The park does not disappoint. There are a million kids trying tech ollie flip tricks around the perimeter of the park, but the bowl is what I’m about. Big and shapely with almost burlesque hips poured into her concrete, I’m in love as soon as I roll in. There are a few local bikers who have the place dialed, nonchalantly airing a few feet out and throwing the bars before heading back down the tranny. The only two skaters riding the bowl are a tall skinny teenager and his little sister, who looks to be about 10, and they have it on lockdown: lipslides on the spine, grinds, rock and rolls — everything smooth and fast. "Yeah!" I yell as they take their runs, stoked on their skills.
I know the times have changed when I see the little girl come up out of the bowl in the $450,000 public piece of silky-smooth concrete perfection, walk over to her mother, who’s posted up on a ledge, get a cell phone and make a call. Not five minutes later there are seven (I counted) Redwood City police officers converging on the bench where my friends and I are sitting. They randomly collar my buddy Scott — though I was the last one to drop in — and write him a ticket for $100. I have to admit, I’m flabbergasted.
Guess what: skateboarding isn’t a crime anymore — it’s gone mainstream. Successful companies hire lobbyists to promote the sport, and communities spend big bucks building new facilities for skaters. And now some skaters, many of them kids who never had to live in the underground world that I did, are using their legitimacy to push out the new outlaws — people who ride BMX bikes.
It’s crazy — two cultures that share so much, fighting over how many wheels they ride.
"Is that your daughter’s bike?"
The question comes from one of my coworkers, and, believe it or not, it’s not intended to be snarky. I can’t ride in public without someone saying "cute little bike," while giggling to themselves — or laughing and pointing. Seeing a six-foot-tall, 200-pound, bald-headed, tattooed white dude on a "kid’s bike" is like being passed on the sidewalk by a bear on a unicycle. At one point reactions like these would’ve rubbed me the wrong way, but nowadays, I nod and smile. Sometimes, I try to explain what constitutes a "full grown" BMX bike. While it’s got small wheels — 20 inches in diameter — the top tube, from the seat to the stem, measures 21 inches, and the handlebars are considered pro-sized at eight inches high by 28 inches wide.
Bicycle motocross, or BMX, is purported to have started in 1963 when the Schwinn corporation of Chicago unveiled the Stingray, which was basically a downsized version of the company’s balloon-tired cruiser-type bikes. Kids pretended to be grown-ups by aping Roger DeCoster and other moto heroes — launching their bikes off jumps, racing in empty fields and abandoned lots, and cranking wheelies down the sidewalks of Anytown, USA.
"It all began the way most individual sports start," motorcycle customizer Jesse James says in a voiceover at the beginning of the 2005 BMX nativity story/documentary Joe Kid on a Stingray, "kids pretending to be grown-ups, but acting like big kids."
I have been riding since I was seven. After three decades, one truism remains, and I can’t candy-coat it. I’ve got to speak it like a true BMXer: BMX is rad. It is and always has been an entity unto itself, progressing from wheelies, skids, and bombing hills to encompass myriad styles and surfaces, from streets to pools to dirt jumps to ramps to the balletic grace of flatland freestyle.
This summer, big kids on little bikes will be jumping 30-foot gaps at as many miles per hour as BMX pays homage to its racing roots at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. On June 12 in New York’s Central Park, Kevin Robinson will try to break the legendary Mat Hoffman’s record for the highest quarter-pipe air on a bike — 26 feet, 6 inches.
It doesn’t take death-defying world records, the X Games, the Olympics, or the stupefaction of squares with cameras to make BMX legit. That feeling of overcoming fear and doubt by jumping a little farther, a little higher, the rush of nailing a trick, or carving a bowl, hasn’t changed in half a century. The legitimacy lies in that feeling, behind your breastbone, and it doesn’t change as you get older. Your wrists hurt, your ankles hurt, and your back hurts, but the feeling is the same. Kid’s bike? Hell yeah, it’s a kid’s bike.
It’s not as though I was blissfully unaware of a beef between bikers and skaters that day in Redwood City. Ask any BMXer to tell you a story of friction between the two and four-wheeled sets, and it’s not going to take them long to come up with something.
"When I was 12 years old, a skateboarder threw my bike out of the bowl at Ripon skatepark," says Jackson Ratima, now 19, a Daly City rider sponsored by Fit Bikes. "He was, like, 20 years old or something."
Tim "Wolfman" Harvey, 21, another up-and-coming pro, tells a similar story about a visit to the Bay Area from his native Massachusetts, when a local skater hassled him at the Novato skatepark. "I didn’t even know anything about California. It was my first time out bike riding, period. The guy was giving me all kinds of crap, yelling at me."
Ironically, Harvey, as friendly and easygoing a guy as you could hope to meet, almost turned pro for skateboarding before an ankle injury made it nearly impossible to ollie, an essential trick in street skating. He now lives in Petaluma and is a member of the painter’s union in San Francisco, where he’s a familiar face at street spots, but now on a bike. Back then, though, he "thought California was a scary place."
The Bay Area — and SF in particular — may be the worst place for bikers seeking a vibe-free session. "I’ve never experienced hostility like it is out here," Ratima says.
Smoldering after the Redwood City incident, I began to fixate on the "Skateboarding Is Not a Crime" slogan from my youth. Originally a bumper sticker made by Transworld Skateboarding magazine in the mid ’80s, Santa Cruz Skateboards currently makes a deck with that written on it, so the skate community has gotten a lot of mileage out of being oppressed.
"Skateboarding isn’t a crime?" I’d ask myself. You’re damned straight skateboarding isn’t a crime: it’s the law. BMX is a crime. There isn’t a biker alive who rides transition who hasn’t rolled into a taxpayer-funded park and had a knee-high grommet point to the sign and say, "Bikes aren’t allowed."
Not allowed, huh? Son, I skated my first pool when you were doing the backstroke in your papa’s ball bag.
Look: I love skateboarding and always will. Both skaters and bikers are doing the same thing, copping that same feeling rolling over the same terrain. The war makes no sense.
"We have religion and race and class dividing us. I refuse to be divided by what type of wheel size I have," says Jon Paul Bail, a local at Alameda’s Cityview skatepark.
Bail, 40, is the artist and pundit behind politicalgridlock.com. Through the Home Project, a program run through the Alameda Unified School District, Bail helped raise $150,000 to build the park, $8,000 of which came directly from his company’s coffers. He helped design the park, and he helped pour the concrete in the park, which opened in 1999. Mixed sessions of bikers and skaters were going down for six months with minor tensions but no major incidents when then–City Attorney Carol Korade advised City Hall that mixed use was too dangerous, and shut the bikers out.
My call to Corinne Centeno, Redwood City’s Director of Parks, Recreation, and Community Services, got off to a rough start: "I understand [the Phil Shao Skatepark] is not bike-legal, right?"
"Right. It was built as a skatepark," she replied, subtly italicizing the first syllable with her tone of voice.
"It wasn’t designed for bikes," she repeated, before adding, "but their having been prohibited from the start hasn’t necessarily kept people out." In an effort to do just that, the city is building a fence around the park, with bids currently ranging from $23,000 to $60,000.
The semantic argument — "it’s called a ‘skatepark,’ not a ‘bike park’<0x2009>" — is usually reserved for laypeople who don’t know enough about skateboarding or bike riding to see its inherent lack of logic.
Drainage ditches are not called a "skating ditches," nor were they designed for skating. Swimming pools are not called "skating pools." Yet, therein lie the roots of the modern skatepark, along with full pipes, which are based on industrial-size drainage systems also not intended for wheels. Every day skateboarders and bikers transcend these limits through creative repurposing.
Collision, and the fear of collision, is the main thing public officials cite when shutting bikers out of parks. "It’s unnerving," Vancouver pro skater Alex Chalmers wrote in a 2004 Thrasher manifesto, "BMX Jihad: Keep It in the Dirt."
"BMXers cover so much ground so quickly, especially when they’re pedaling frantically to blast a transfer, that it’s particularly hard to gauge these collisions," he wrote.
But the fact is that in any given park BMXers and skaters take different lines, and the best way to acclimate each group to the other is through exposure. If bike riders are banned, it increases the risk of collisions when a few bikers decide to chance the ticket or brave the vibe-out and ride anyway. A lot of bikers hit parks early in the morning because they don’t want to deal with hassles. During the overlap in "shifts," this leads to bewildered skaters who aren’t used to the lines a biker takes, and vice versa.
And the head-on menace is greatly overstated, largely disappearing when a park is integrated, if only unofficially. At Cityview, the police have displayed somewhat less zeal in ticketing bikers during the past few years. "They treat us like gays in the military," says Bail. "Don’t ask, don’t tell." And yet everyone manages to coexist.
At the new $850,000 skatepark in Benicia, which opened in October, integration isn’t a big deal. "From its conception, we designed it to be a skateboard park and also for bikes," says Mike Dotson, assistant director of parks and recreation. Technically, the park has designated bike hours, but since it’s largely unsupervised, there’s a mildly laissez-faire approach to enforcement. "In the very beginning there was a lot of concern about the use of both bikes and skateboards," Dotson says, stating that the park was packed the first few months. "Initially we had one or two calls on it. Since then I can say I haven’t had any calls on it — in relation to bikes and skateboards being in it at the same time or other complaints."
And there are mixed-use parks all over the world, as far away as Thailand and as nearby as Oregon: "You go to Oregon, and you can ride wherever you want," says a stunned Maurice Meyer, 41, lifelong San Francisco resident and founding member of legendary bike and skate trick team the Curb Dogs. Long Beach, Las Vegas, Phoenix, even Alex Chalmers’ hometown of Vancouver — all have parks where bikes and skates legally ride at the same time. What’s up with the Bay?
Lawyers, insurance underwriters, and city hall types may never understand how a park works. "It’s out of ignorance," Bail says. "To them it looks like chaos. To anyone who has skate etiquette — which is everyone — we all take turns."
Besides, let’s face facts: a skatepark is a dangerous place — to different degrees at different times, and for different reasons. "I swear to God, every time I go to the skatepark I see a hundred boards flying all over the place," Ratima says, "and I’ve never seen a bike go flying and land on a guy’s head." It’s not an inflatable jumpy house — it’s fun, but it’s not made out of cotton balls and your mother isn’t here. Usually.
Rose Dennis, press liaison for the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, seemed baffled that someone would want to ride a bicycle inside the skatepark part of the new Potrero del Sol. Perhaps as a way of distracting me from my damn-fool idea, she kept hyping the park’s "other amenities."
I live three blocks from Golden Gate Park — if I want to play Frisbee, I’m not going to drive across town. I want to ride. When I brought up the possibility of scheduling bike-only sessions in the yet-to-be opened park, she suggested I draft a letter to general manager Yomi Agunbiade, before adding that "the facility wasn’t designed for that type of recreation."
When I (graciously, I thought) let her know that it would be not only possible to ride a bike there, but highly gratifying, she got a little heated: "At the end of the day, the buck stops with us. If one of you guys breaks your skull open and you’re bleeding all over the place, believe me, no one’s going to have any sympathy for Rec and Park if they make really nonjudicious decisions."
In other words, like a lot of city officials, she’s worried about getting sued.
But you know what? There’s actually less chance a BMXer will successfully sue the city. I give you California Government Code Section 831.7, which states the following: "Neither a public entity nor a public employee is liable to any person who participates in a hazardous recreational activity … who knew or reasonably should have known that the hazardous recreational activity created a substantial risk of injury to himself or herself and was voluntarily in the place of risk."
The law lists "bicycle racing or jumping" as being a "hazardous recreational activity." It’s on a fairly extensive list, along with diving boards, horseback riding, and the ever-popular rocketeering, skydiving, and spelunking, which, as I’m sure you’ve heard, are all the rage with the kids these days — much more popular than BMX.
But the words "skateboarding," "skateboarder," and "skateboard" are not listed anywhere in the text of the Hazardous Recreational Activities law, commonly called the HRA law. In fact, the International Association of Skateboard Companies has been lobbying to get the bill amended to specifically include "skateboarding" since 1995, when Assemblymember Bill Morrow (R-San Diego) took up the issue. Morrow’s bill was rejected by the state Senate Judiciary Committee in 1996. In 1997, Morrow and skateboard association lobbyist Jim Fitzpatrick gave up on amending the HRA and instead pushed Assembly Bill 1296, which added Provision 115800 to the state’s Health and Safety Code, which states, in part and in much less forceful language — without using the word "liable," for instance — that owners or operators of local skateparks that are not supervised must require skaters to wear helmets, elbow pads, and knee pads, and that they must post a sign stating said requirement.
It doesn’t say anything about "if one of you guys breaks your skull open and you’re bleeding all over the place" while wearing a helmet, then you can’t hold the operator liable.
When I asked San Francisco Deputy City Attorney Virginia Dario-Elizando how the law might apply to the city’s skateparks, she told me, "This question has never come up. I must tell you, I’ve never even seen the rules for the skateparks — no one’s ever asked me to look at them."
BMXers are willing to compromise if that’s what it takes. In May, San Jose opened the 68,000-square-foot Lake Cunningham skatepark, built by the same design firm (Wormhoudt) as the Benicia park at a price of $4.7 million, and the place has bike hours. Like any park, there are rules. Like some parks, there’s supervision, so the rules are enforced: separate bike sessions; helmet, elbow, and knee pads required at all times; brakes required on bikes; no smoking; no songs with swear words over the park soundsystem; no bikes in the three bowls with pool coping even though they only allow plastic pegs, which are undoubtedly softer on coping than metal skateboard trucks … it’s a long list of restrictions. It’s inconvenient for guys who don’t like pads or don’t run brakes, and there’s some griping, but we’ve got our eyes on the prize: the place is amazing, with a huge full pipe, massive vert bowls, and a decent street course.
I would like skaters to realize a couple of things: skating and BMX aren’t so different from each other, at least in the feeling each gives you, right there, behind your sternum, where your heart beats.
Bikers are going to ride no matter what, just like skaters are going to skate. Legal or not, we’re not going to go away. "I got arrested for riding there when I was 14," Ratima says of the Daly City skatepark. "They took my bike and threw it in the back of the car. I just kept going every day, and finally they just gave up."
"I’ve ridden bikes on vert," Thrasher editor Jake Phelps tells me during a phone conversation. "I can ride a bike in a pool, I can do that. I’m stoked when I ride a bike in a pool. Feels hella fun to me. Catching air on a bike is awesome, no doubt about that."
This, from the longtime editor of the bible of the "fuck BMX" set. It’s either baffling or heartening. I can’t decide which. "I don’t mind people that are just regular," he says. "If they’re skateboard people or they’re bike people too, I’ll respect anybody that respects me."
That’s what it comes down to: respect. I respect the fact that skateboarders did not come into this age of skateparks easily. I faded out when there was nothing, and I came back when they were in small towns across America, and I missed all the politicos and dreary meetings. It’s time for bikers to stop feeling like second-class citizens and demand a seat at the table. In the words of Black Flag, it’s time to rise above.
TECHSPLOITATION I just love saying that scientists are creating "human-animal hybrid clones" because that single phrase pulls together about 15 nightmares from science fiction and religion all at the same time. Although if you think about it, one fear really should cancel out the other one. I mean, if you’re worried about human cloning, then the fact that these are clones created by sticking human DNA inside cow eggs should be comforting. I mean, it’s not really a human anymore at that point, right?
But the real reason I’m gloating over this piece of completely
ordinary biological weirdness is that last week the British Parliament began the process of legalizing human-animal hybrid embryo cloning. While not explicitly illegal in the United States, the process has been so criticized (including by former president Bill Clinton) that most researchers have stayed away from it. Now, however, this law could make it easy for Brits to advance their medicine far faster than people in the supposedly high-tech and super-advanced United States.
You see, these scary hybrids could become stem cell goldmines. One of the barriers to getting stem cells for research is that they only come from human embryos, and human embryos come from human women. Some of us may be cool with donating our eggs to science, but a lot of us aren’t — and that means scientists don’t have a lot of material to work with if they want to do stem cell research that could do things like reverse organ failure and cure Alzheimer’s.
And that’s where these human-animal hybrids come in. We can already inject DNA into the nucleus of a cow egg and zap it with electricity, thus reprogramming that egg to be human. And we can even get that egg to start dividing as if it were an embryo, creating a bunch of human stem cells. Beyond that, we just aren’t sure. Will these embryos create viable stem cells to treat all those nasty human diseases? Or will they just be duds that act too much like cow cells to be usable by humans? If there’s even a small chance that the former will come to pass, it’s worth investigating — and we’ll have solved the human stem cell shortage problem.
That’s why scientists in the United Kingdom are doing it, and why their government is debating exactly how the process should be regulated. You wouldn’t necessarily know that from the way it’s been covered in the media, where even the normally staid International Herald Tribune began an article about the potential UK law with this sentence: "The British Parliament has voted to allow the creation of human-animal embryos, which some scientists say are vital to find cures for diseases but which critics argue pervert the course of nature." Nice move, throwing in the word "pervert" there.
When the media writes about how scientists might "pervert the course of nature," and the anti-science group Human Genetics Alert is bombarding me and pretty much every other science journalist on the planet with crazed, uniformed screeds about how this law will lead to "designer babies," you start to feel like a huge portion of the population doesn’t know the difference between science and science fiction. Indeed, one of the most anticipated sci-fi horror movies for next year is Splice, which is about a pair of rock star geneticists who create a human-animal hybrid. Of course the hybrid happens to be a deadly, exotic-looking woman with wings and a tail and a super-hot body. Early images released from the production show her naked, with her animal parts looking sexy and dangerous.
The completely impossible "designer baby" in Splice is what most people think will happen when scientists create human-animal hybrid clones. But creating something like the sexy Splice lady is not only beyond the reach of current science, it is also illegal under the proposed UK law. The hybrid clones will only be permitted to develop for about two weeks, which is the time required to create stem cells. After that, they must be destroyed. So the UK law actually makes the nightmare scenario impossible, not possible.
And that’s why I’m psyched about getting my human-animal hybrid clones. *
Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who can’t wait to see the world populated with human-elephant-dolphin hybrids.
Marke “too many pills, you’re not 17 anymore” B is at Movement ’08: Detroit’s Electronic Music Festival. Read part one here, and part two here. Apples! Apples everywhere! Downtown Detroit is a laptop orchard. “Mac should really sponsor these things,” said Hunky Beau, freshly arrived on the scene to improve my picture quality. But the answer is that Mac doesn’t have to — those glowing, half-eaten little beauties speak from the booths themselves. Oh, that Girl Talk. All pics by David Schnur DEMF’s day 2 was so pleasant it hurt, and the crowd was full of neon-festooned hipsters (they have them here too!) eagerly passing time before new old-school rap duo Cool Kids and sample-happy girly boy Girl Talk hit the the Red Bull stage, which overlooked the Detroit River. We passed the time in the sunny company of the great Mr. De’ featuring Greg C. Johnson, whose “Sex on the Beach” from back in the day is a protobooty classic. The crowd was going nuts — Mr. De’ schooled the “ghetto tech” kids on some real sensuality. Mr. De’ sexing the keyboardGreg C. Johnson, pleased Cool Kids gave a predictably stunner set — even calling out to Detroit and pumping some rhymes over ancient electro — and then Girl Talk came on and the crowd went bananas. I’ve never really warmed to the Girl Talk phenomenon. We have great mashup artists in SF, and dropping some Public Enemy over a Toto sample is sooo 2005. Still, the man’s a genius when it comes to party music and self-promotion: who knew all you had to do was post several YouTube vids of kids stage diving off your laptop platform and you could be famous? Well, maybe everybody knows that now, but Girl Talk knew it first. And who am I to argue, even when he dropped his pants and mooned the crowd in his boxers for half his set while he leaned over his equipment. But this year is indubitably Richie Hawtin’s year — despite other hometown giants Kevin Saunderson, Carl Craig, Stacey Pullen, and Alton Miller on the roster — so after a few Girl Talk singalongs (oh yes, there was stage-diving) we went over to the Beatport tent to catch the Windsor homeboy in a harder mood tan the previous night, at least until he dropped Mory Kante’s “Yeke Yeke” and the dance floor exploded. Richie Hawtin: Gettin’ Yeke
Native Detroit gadabout Marke B. hits Movement: The Detroit Electronic Music Festival That thing where you return to your hometown and immediately, or at least on the ride home from the ex-urb airport, begin to feel your former soul flood back into you – old or familiar buildings take on some weightier significance in the fading evening light, new buildings even more. And then you’re hooking up with old friends downtown, smoking a bowl or two, generally reminiscing and catching up, and driving around looking for a party, although you wouldn’t mind if you just stayed in the minivan bopping to 20-year-old Balearic beats and laughing your ass off with your BFFs. The grand, abandoned Michigan Central Train Station, two blocks from my Corktown residence in tha D. (Don’t try to throw a party here, you’ll get srsly busted.) All of which is a belabored way of saying that I didn’t get much afterhours in here in Detroit last night, the “official” pre-party night of Movement: The Detroit Electronic Music Festival, now going on nine years. Sure there were big bonanza advertised shindigs – this festival attracts tens of thousands of globe-hopping techno-lovers to the bowels of the Motor City, no mean feat, that – but for me and my SF fairy-dusted baggage none of them grabbed on all night long. That’s OK: where else in the world but here would you find yourself on a dance floor with legendary DJs Juan Atkins and Eddie “Flashin’” Fowlkes — and 20 other people? Their party “The Fuzion of Science & Techno” had moved from the Detroit Science Center to the grand Majestic Theatre at the last minute, due to what I judge to be poor pre-sales. At first that was cause for a little alarm – the Science Center party is a bit of a tradition, and with a line-up that included Theo Parrish, Mike Clark, Kenny Dixon, Jr, and Alton Miller, the lack of draw was a shocker. Plus, the usual tiny panic hits: is techno really dead? Have the “neo-electro faddists,” as Detroit music journalist Hobey Echlin calls them, taken over and relegated soulful tech-house to another early grave? Aw, hell no, it was just midnight on a Friday in downtown Detroit. We were probably way too early, wot.
Oh, that Girl Talk. All pics by David Schnur DEMF’s day 2 was so pleasant it hurt, and the crowd was full of neon-festooned hipsters (they have them here too!) eagerly passing time before new old-school rap duo Cool Kids and sample-happy girly boy Girl Talk hit the the Red Bull stage, which overlooked the Detroit River. We passed the time in the sunny company of the great Mr. De’ featuring Greg C. Johnson, whose “Sex on the Beach” from back in the day is a protobooty classic. The crowd was going nuts — Mr. De’ schooled the “ghetto tech” kids on some real sensuality. 
Mr. De’ sexing the keyboard 
Greg C. Johnson, pleased Cool Kids gave a predictably stunner set — even calling out to Detroit and pumping some rhymes over ancient electro — and then Girl Talk came on and the crowd went bananas. I’ve never really warmed to the Girl Talk phenomenon. We have great mashup artists in SF, and dropping some Public Enemy over a Toto sample is sooo 2005. Still, the man’s a genius when it comes to party music and self-promotion: who knew all you had to do was post several YouTube vids of kids stage diving off your laptop platform and you could be famous? Well, maybe everybody knows that now, but Girl Talk knew it first. And who am I to argue, even when he dropped his pants and mooned the crowd in his boxers for half his set while he leaned over his equipment. But this year is indubitably Richie Hawtin’s year — despite other hometown giants Kevin Saunderson, Carl Craig, Stacey Pullen, and Alton Miller on the roster — so after a few Girl Talk singalongs (oh yes, there was stage-diving) we went over to the Beatport tent to catch the Windsor homeboy in a harder mood tan the previous night, at least until he dropped Mory Kante’s “Yeke Yeke” and the dance floor exploded. 
Richie Hawtin: Gettin’ Yeke
The grand, abandoned Michigan Central Train Station, two blocks from my Corktown residence in tha D. (Don’t try to throw a party here, you’ll get srsly busted.) All of which is a belabored way of saying that I didn’t get much afterhours in here in Detroit last night, the “official” pre-party night of