The Bay Guardian is interviewing the candidates for the 2007 elections. We’ll be updating this entry as more information comes in. Post your thoughts or comments below.
Mayor Gavin Newsom
“I’m not satisfied.”
Gavin Newsom interview
Visit the Guardian 2007 Election Center for updates, more interviews, and 2007 election news.
By Chris DeMento
Designer toilet lid covers: a stylish new commode-ity?
I know. On the surface, it’s another pisspoor excuse for bad punning, a miserable plastic something or other you don’t really need. So, if you’re feeling socially responsible, you might want to ignore this fantastic new product . . . join hands with your fellow mans, recline in the park with your head resting on a djembe, somnolently chant and defy Time, and drop an occasional al fresco deuce. Namaste.
But for all you patriotic spenders out there, put down your iPhone and your MGD, and get your face out of that deliciously carcinogenic apple pie so you can accessorize your American poop room.
Visit www.Toilet-Tattoos.com and check out the many ways you can now bring a little jazz to that ass. (Those raggedy shag covers are beyond passé.) The ready-to-apply patterns range in appearance from the conservative (see Wallpaper, and Classic) to the capricious (see Artist Canvas). Installation is simple. And if you want to change things up, just remove, wipe clean, and re-apply a different toilet tat. Try on a Seasonal number for the holidays. Bored with convention? Design your own lid cover and have your all your neighbors lighting a second match just to see what the fuck that is on top of your toilet seat.
You need this like you need the Container Store. But nothing says, “Welcome, shit inside me,” quite like one of these.
By Soo Oh
Every year in September, Girls Incorporated holds its Women of Taste event at the terraced gardens of Oakland Museum to support young girls in Alameda County, encouraging them to be “strong, smart, and bold.” It doesn’t hurt to be a patron (matron?) to the cause when it involves three levels of catered food from Bay Area restaurants on a slightly breezy Saturday night in the East Bay.
The Bay Guardian is interviewing community leaders about the issues at stake in the upcoming 2007 elections. We’ll be updating this entry as more information comes in. Post your thoughts or comments below.
Supervisor Jake McGoldrick on Props G, J, and K
“Do we have to submit to advertisers to get things done?”
Jake McGoldrick interview
Visit the Guardian 2007 Election Center for updates, more interviews, and 2007 election news.
By Amber Peckham
As summer bids a fond farewell to the city, getting the most out of the few beautiful days that are left is a must. If you’re looking for an activity suitable for groups of all sizes, take a jaunt over to the 8th Annual World Veg Festival at the county fair building in Golden Gate Park. The festival spans the whole weekend, and is free from 10-10:30, after which the suggested donation is $5.
The San Francisco Vegetarian Society puts the event together, and has over its eight year lifespan attracted other sponsors that also take part in the festivities. For example, this year’s co-sponsor is the group In Defense of Animals, adding pet adoption to the weekend’s other activities, speakers, and performances.
The Bay Guardian is interviewing community leaders about the issues at stake in the upcoming 2007 elections. We’ll be updating this entry as more information comes in. Post your thoughts or comments below.
Friends of the San Francisco Public Library on Prop D and other election issues
Friends of the Public Library interview
The Bay Guardian is interviewing community leaders about the issues at stake in the upcoming 2007 elections. We’ll be updating this entry as more information comes in. Post your thoughts or comments below.
San Francisco Police Department Representative John Scully on Prop F
John Scully interview
Visit the Guardian 2007 Election Center for updates, more interviews, and 2007 election news.
The Bay Guardian is interviewing community leaders about the issues at stake in the upcoming 2007 elections. We’ll be updating this entry as more information comes in. Post your thoughts or comments below.
Supervisor Chris Daly on Prop E and other election issues
“Proposition E is the one item on the ballot that provides some checks and balances”
Chris Daly interview
Visit the Guardian 2007 Election Center for updates, more interviews, and 2007 election news.
The Bay Guardian is interviewing community leaders about the issues at stake in the upcoming 2007 elections. We’ll be updating this entry as more information comes in. Post your thoughts or comments below.
Supervisor Aaron Peskin on Prop A and other election issues
Aaron Peskin interview
Visit the Guardian 2007 Election Center for updates, more interviews, and 2007 election news.
By Amber Peckham
All dressed up with nowhere to go? Not anymore. Dig those funkalicious duds and worn-out sex toys out of your attic (you know they’re up there) and head over to Oakland’s Parkway Theater tonight, where Babeland is holding a screening of the erotic film The Opening of Misty Beethoven. The screening kicks off with a “Sexy 70’s” costume contest, where three lucky winners will receive $30 Babeland gift cards, and the film will be followed by a raffle in which three more filmgoers will receive Babeland Body Kits.
By Soo Oh
If you have the privilege of living in California — home to a wealth, nay, an embarrassment, of agricultural riches — then eating locally farmed products isn’t only your right, it’s practically a duty. The Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA) is holding their fifth annual Sunday Supper this weekend at the eminently cool Ferry Building off the Embarcadero, featuring family-style dinners by the Bay’s finest chefs, cooked up from the produce sold at the Ferry Plaza Market. Proceeds go toward funding the market, where California farmers traffic in the perfectly legal trade of fresh, organic produce.
Tickets for the reception and four-course supper are still available, so check it out: www.cuesa.org/events/sunday_supper_2007.php
From artice: 14 American Apparel Models Freed In Daring Midnight Raid
By Paula Connelly
Ever wonder what you’re out of work actor and artist friends have been up to? On the cover of this week’s Onion is a picture of one of my dear friends from college! And no, she’s not unemployed. She works for the Onion.
Well played, Onion. American Apparel ads and the sub-culture that they infer are disturbing. (Like the ones with girls spread eagle in the back of a taxi cab, for example.) My favorite line from the article would have to be:
“Before I knew it, I was squatting on the floor in this humid room with a camera pointed at my crotch,” said model Gabrielle, whose image can be found on the back page of this newspaper.
The Bay Guardian is interviewing the candidates for the 2007 elections. We’ll be updating this entry as more information comes in. Post your thoughts or comments below.
San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey
“From about 1850 to 1895, the San Francisco police chief was elected. I think it’d be a very good idea for this city. It’s a small enough city that I think the elected politicians really try to be responsive to the public will.”
Michael Hennessey interview
Visit the Guardian 2007 Election Center for updates, more interviews, and 2007 election news.
The Bay Guardian is interviewing the candidates for the 2007 elections. We’ll be updating this entry as more information comes in. Post your thoughts or comments below.
District Attorney: Kamala Harris
“It’s a self-defeating thing to say, ‘I’m not going to work because the DA won’t prosecute.’ … If no report is taken, then you’re right, I’m not going to prosecute.”
Kamala Harris interview
Visit the Guardian 2007 Election Center for updates, more interviews, and 2007 election news.
The Bay Guardian is interviewing the candidates for the 2007 elections. We’ll be updating this entry as more information comes in. Post your thoughts or comments below.
Mayoral candidate Harold Hoogasian
“I decided to run after this bozo took away 400 garbage cans and called it an anti-litter program.”
Harold Hoogasian interview
Harold Hoogasian news on SFBG.com
Visit the Guardian 2007 Election Center for updates, more interviews, and 2007 election news.
The Bay Guardian is interviewing the candidates for the 2007 elections. We’ll be updating this entry as more information comes in. Post your thoughts or comments below.
Mayoral candidate: Grasshopper Alec Kaplan
Grasshopper Alec Kaplan interview
Visit the Guardian 2007 Election Center for updates, more interviews, and 2007 election news.
By Amber Peckham
Dining out alone is, for me, one of the most socially awkward experiences imaginable. Now, I don’t mean dining out at a fast food joint or anything like that; I’m talking about dining out for real, with tables and menus and cloth napkins. I usually try to avoid dining out alone at all costs. I will go hungry for hours until I have someone to eat with, because in my mind, a meal is an experience you are supposed to share; and if I’m alone while I eat, it’s usually all I can think about.
(I would like to interject here that I don’t have any problem being by myself. In fact, I usually prefer it. That whole “afraid of their own thoughts, has to surround themselves with people” thing does not and never has applied to me. I just hate eating alone. I grew up in a family who ate together.)
On one particular day, though, waiting for company wasn’t an option. I was alone in Japan Town on a crazy quest for dishes, and I needed to refuel. My stomach had been set on udon noodles for about an hour, but before I could get them, I actually had to locate a restaurant, go in, sit down, and order. Alone.
By Lotto Chancellor
What all can you do with a blues skeleton? For starters, get it high as hell and drown it in whiskey, beer, and more whiskey, then drop it in a vat of chitterling grease and give it a megaphone. That’s my conclusion after seeing New Orleans’ own Morning 40 Federation at the Boom Boom Room last Friday.
Scully, Andrepont, Cohen and (just barely) Calandra
From the git-go, Morning 40 Federation made the most of that Boom Boomin’ system. Lead singer Josh Cohen came out of the gate slinging rhymes about 40-drinking, asking mid-flow, “Have you ever seen a white boy this drunk on the street?” Sure enough, this opening funk-hop number had all the white girls shaking their asses. Cohen smeared his manifold vocal interpretations like he was your pappy, offering up, at one point, one of the dirtiest cokesnorts I’ve ever heard. Whenever Cohen was otherwise occupied — blowing straightforward, thick, and heavy Baritone lines, or boozing — it was guitarist Ryan Scully who delighted to grab the vocal by the proverbial balls. The two wound up basically sharing the task of carrying the songs, whether in unison or by alternately crooning, screaming, and growling about flake, hookers, ex-bandmembers, and your mother. Scully found just the right amount of self-congratulation in an affected falsetto. Somehow, the rhythm section of Steve Calandra and Mike Andrepont kept things together; guitarist Bailey Smith awoke now and again from his stage-drunk state to wail on something. From all sides it was a skank-out, stank-out, relentless kind of rock and roll, full of winks and nods at blues music’s perfectly messy history.
So if you like ebb-and-flow mood arrangements, and perhaps some degree of emotional sensitivity in your music, don’t expect as much from this bunch of easy drunkards. But if you want some of that good olski from down the Bayou, the kind that thrums of Dumpsterjuice inspiration (Dumpsterjuice is, as Cohen explained, the stuff that oozes out of the trash compressors during post-Mardi Gras street-cleaning efforts), dig these guys.
By Molly Freedenberg
Imagine a concert held in your college quad, add a gorgeous view of the Bay, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what the Treasure Island Music Festival was like this weekend. Organizers were smart enough not to be overly ambitious, either with the space or the lineup, so that the fledgling fest fit just right inside its britches: two stages appropriately far apart so you never felt crowded nor lonely, enough vendors and bathrooms so no line was ever very long, and just enough musical acts to fill two whole days without overlapping each other (which, by the way, is the Number One Best Thing about TIMF. And after five years of Coachella I’m-missing-something anxiety, I should know).
Highlights of Saturday’s hip-hop and electronica heavy lineup:
*Zion I’s high-energy freestyling, which continued through a brief blackout, and their DJ manipulating a Playstation controller like a turntable.
*The moments when Honeycut sounded like an American version of Kinky.
*Everything about Kid Beyond’s U2-meets-Nine Inch Nails beatboxing.
*The gold lame pants only M.I.A. could pull off.
It’s really too bad if you missed it, because this one was so successful, next year’s is bound to be a zoo.
Note: Stay tuned tomorrow for more photos and commentary.
By Lotto Chancellor
My avatar has a 7.5 soft, looks like the late Vonnegut Jr., and speaks French. And he can make all my delusions of grandeur come virtually true.
For those who don’t know: an avatar is a simulated, pixilated, entirely customizable web identity rendered by the programmer gods in the image of man. Websites like SecondLife.com give users the chance to guide their avatars through virtual worlds in search of racy online chatting, or perhaps a pair of those brand name cybersneakers. As real-life simulators, virtual worlds exist as meticulously detailed, fully discoverable environments, and they feature all the benefits of user-to-user interaction. You control every move your avatar makes: setting up an intimate chat with the cute avatar over there in the assless chaps, for example, or taking a stroll across town to the virtual salon, saloon, or bird sanctuary. Yep, it’s just like the real world, but one step removed.
Most controversial among virtual world sites right now is RedLightCenter.com, offering its users oodles of hedonistic cyber-experiences: puffing cheeba, fondling a paramour, or executing Cleveland Steamer…and now making money.
Intern Amber Peckham remembers outsider artist Jimmy Lee Sudduth.
As a sixth grader on a field trip to Washington DC, I was fortunate enough to see one of Jimmy Lee Sudduth’s works, Fantastic Building, on display at the Smithsonian Institute. It was the only painting that lingered in my mind on the long drive home, simultaneously conjuring up fond memories of sand castles and horrific daydreams of prisons and boarding schools.
Fantastic Building, c.a. 1970’s, Smithsonian Institute
Intrigued, and mildly bored once summer came, I decided to further explore Sudduth’s work and was amazed by the depth of his innovation. To keep his mud paint from crumbling off the plywood he used as canvas, Sudduth mixed it with sugar, honey, and even diet Pepsi, and to color the mud he used herbs and flowers from the woods around his home, where he spent most of his youth in the company of his medicine-woman mother. He painted using only his fingers and claimed to have discovered 36 different kinds of mud in his home state of Alabama.
Intrepid intern Lotto Chancellor rants about city bicyclists who should ride better — or get off the road.
To the Idiot (not meaning every, just the Idiot) Bicyclist:
Congratulations. You’re blowing it.
You strike fear into the very heart of me when I have to watch you sucking around on that thing like an ignoramus, cutting off cars at intersection, drawling down 16th Street in the center of the lane, following whatever rules of the road seem useful at the time, because it’s all about you and your sustainable-coma commute—not about me or my post-wreck PTSD or my rented Malibu exploding your situation. The second-degree embarrassment I feel for you is also profound. Yes, like the public service announcements around town declare, your decision to buck the highway and cruise the green way saves us power, and proves you’re a great and verdant guy. It’s almost as bad as having to see some poor 27-year-old quarter-life crisis springing himself toward his death, the Financial District, “carving it up,” a yuck-yuck Tofurkey on a longboard named Brock.
Awesome!
By Molly Freedenberg
I used to wonder if there was some unspoken law about Burning Man that the only music appropriate for Black Rock City was electronica – as though somehow the magic would be lost if someone played Kiss instead of Kruder & Dorfmeister, or maybe you’d just get jumped by moon-boot wearing playa rats if you blasted the Descendents from your art car instead of DJ Ooah. And after six years of visiting the playa, I’ve noticed that there is some kind of symbiosis between the stark desert landscape and the driving, thumping, not-quite-earthbound beats of techno music.
But that doesn’t mean I’ve ever been fully converted. I can tolerate most electronic music. I even genuinely like some of it. But after a day or two being assaulted by ooncha ooncha from what seems like every goddamned corner of the earth, I inevitably find myself craving good old rock’n’roll – hell, I’d even settle for some whiny folk music – the way I used to crave real Mexican food when I lived in Portland (land of white cheese, black beans, and whole wheat tortillas. Good? Sure. But Mexican food? Hardly.)
Another thing I’ve been doing since my first Burning Man? Joking with friends about burning the man early. Or, even better, flying an airplane equipped with fire retardant over the man just as it’s about to burn, putting out the flames: biggest communal buzz kill EVER.
Man, that guy’s DJ decks look a lot like drums.
Well, it seems this year two of my deepest playa desires were satisfied: Someone (Paul Addis?) burned the man on Tuesday – which, though I feel sorry for the people who had to do five days work in one night to build the man again by Saturday, I find hilarious and appropriate. And people played music with actual – wait for it, wait for it – instruments. Yup, you heard me. Drums. Guitars. A bass or two. Not simulated by computer programs, but stroked and slammed and banged and picked by human hands.
By Molly Freedenberg
(Obligatory disclaimer: Yes, I love bubblegum pop. If you have a problem with that, bite me.)
I am in serious denial. I can’t believe that the wobbling, nervous (or stoned?), first-time-in-a-talent-show performer at last night’s VMAs was Britney – my Britney. I remember the days when even those who hated her music had to admit that she was a fantastic (and quite attractive) performer. And even through all the media mess she’s become tangled with in the last few years, and her fantastically horrible reality TV show, what’s kept me going – and rooting for her — is remembering just how mesmerizing she can be on stage. And so I’ve been eagerly anticipating her performance at the VMAs, hoping she’d blow the skeptics away with her trademark snap and sparkle. But no.
AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill
Who are you and what have you done with my Britney?
She looked out of practice and out of shape (and I don’t mean her slightly plumper body, which would be sexy if she didn’t look like she’d borrowed it for the night and therefore didn’t know how to wear it,) as though she couldn’t keep up with her choreography and definitely couldn’t handle those heels – and that both of those things were distracting her from pretending to sing. It was so painful to watch, not only because of the vicarious embarrassment factor, but because I really like Britney and wanted her to do well. I only wish she’d taken into account whatever her limitations are (Quaalude addiction? Too much time defending her mothering skills and not enough in the dance studio?
“Photo by Kurt&Bart.
I miss this Britney.
The amount of alcohol required to forget she ever married KFed?) and shaped a performance that highlighted her existing strengths, rather than trying – and failing – to embody her former self. Still, I’m not inspired to take shots about how she’s a wash-up at 25 (shame on you, Sarah Silverman). Instead, I’d like to give her a hug, introduce her to my former therapist in Westlake Village, and watch my “Toxic” DVD until my girl makes a real comeback.
