Roller Derby’s Back…Game at the Pavilion This Saturday (OCT. 11)

The Clothes Were Coming Off in Potrero Hill…

getting ready for her close-up...

it ain't as easy as it looks...

hard at work...

The Return of the Pin-up

Camera shutters were clicking and clothes were coming off in Potrero Hill this weekend. Fifteen photographers from up and down the West Coast gathered at Blue Sky Rental Studios for an all-day bootcamp hosted by Zivity.com. Zivity specializes in publishing pin-up photos, which from what I saw, ranged from Betty Page-styled portraits to stuff that was a good bit more graphic. With that range, it’s no wonder that a number of people I spoke to used different names for what was being shot. Some called their style glamour, others used the term erotica. Cyan, the founder of Zivity and a model in her own right, preferred the term glamour, but said that the regardless of what you call it, the photos she was interested in “all had to tell a story in which the woman’s form is the focus.” The people who shoot for us,” Cyan told me, “need to have a love of photography and of beautiful women.”

The phrase beautiful women, I noticed, was used a lot that day. And admittedly, I was thrown by it at first. Maybe I’ve had a few too many feminist theory classes, but for a moment, my PC Meter was going crazy. Should I object to what I was seeing? Was my silence somehow causing me to play some sordid role in the objectification of women? (OK, so maybe I’m exaggerating what I felt, but I was a bit uneasy.)

Mona, a participant and only one of three women at the bootcamp, told me she was hopeful that Zivity would open up the market to models who weren’t “all skinny and all white.” She added that she’d like to see women of other ethnicities get involved, and that Zivity seemed open to that. That made me feel better. And then there was also the fact that though I was walking around a room with women taking their clothes off for groups of men with cameras, the vibe was all-business.

That’s when it hit me: though the photos being taken were sexy and fun, the process of taking them was neither. In fact, and I know some friends of mine won’t believe me when I say it, the main lesson that the bootcamp was teaching those fifteen photographers was that sexy and fun are products of discipline and craft.

Who would’ve thunk it?

The Taoist writes for the San Francisco Bay Guardian…

Hello everyone,

 

Check out a piece I just got published at the SF Bay Guardian.  Consider it my first installment of the quirk-o-meter. Write me and tell me what you think.

 Here’s the link:

http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/gsf/2008/09/iron_crotches_wonder_dogs_and.html

The Best Movie You Missed This Summer…

The fact that The Fall took three years to get to the screen and that when it did, it was panned by critics makes you realize why George Bush got reelected in 2004.  People don’t just get the leaders they deserve, they get the art they deserve, as well. 

The Fall is a story within a story.  Set in Southern California during the 20s, two strangers find each other in a hospital while they are both convalescing from injuries.  Their relationship begins with Roy (Lee Pace) telling a fantastic epic tale to Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), a little girl who, like Roy, is recovering from more than just a physical injury.  It seems at first that Roy is just passing the time, but the story he is telling his friend, for all its imaginative power, points to the realities and problems in his own life.  The split structure between reality and imagination allows the movie to be an adventure, but one with a real emotional payoff.  Half the movie is set in far off lands, and half of it, is about a man trying to grow up.  The thing that separates this movie from a lot of other “man-boy” movies that seem so popular nowadays is that his teacher isn’t another person, it’s his epic fairy tale that heals the real wounds he’s struggling with.

It’s a clever structure that shows the power of storytelling.  But powerful storytelling, alas, doesn’t sell.  The Fall was barely able to get distribution because no one was sure what to call it.  Is it a kid’s movie?  Is it a fantasy?  One of the stars is a child, but the violence in the film negates any possibility of this being suitable for children.  And the main story about a man learning to deal with heartbreak and rejection probably wouldn’t sell with the comics crowd.  So, the critics called it a failed movie, never stopping to think that maybe Tarsem Singh (the director and writer) was not out to make a kid’s tale at all, or a fantasy, for that matter.  Instead, he’s created a story that if we paid attention to, would instruct us as to why we’re willing to spend two hours and twelve bucks every time we go to the movies.

 

Quirk-o-meter coming soon…

I’ve been looking for a theme for this site, and one thing that coes to mind is that I love the quirky-fringe stuff that makes communities what they are.  Today, in my role as a Culture Intern for the SF Bay Guardian, I went to an erotica boot camp and interviewed budding photographrs and models who were exposing themselves.  Then, I followed that up by doing an interview with the GM of the San Francisco Bombers–woohoo.  He was a great guy.  Everyone I met today was great, actually.

The point here is not that they were great, however.  The real point is that after all is said and done, the best way to tie in all my interests and make a viable blog is to admit to myself that what I love best is the quirky, the odd, but not the sexy oddities.  I don’t mind the tats and piercings.  It’s fine.  Except that a lot of it seems for show, and not out of real self expression.

All of this to say, that starting tomorrow, I will start a weekly (could become more regular) piece on the quirky people that live here in San Fran.  There are a lot of them.  And I am excited to start covering them.  Stay tuned!!

The Three-Minute Romance…

dancing against cynicism...

I had heard that there were free swing dance lessons given in Golden Gate Park every Sunday, and being a lover of all things quirky, I thought it might be worth seeing just how many people showed up. I assumed I’d find a few couples, some guys in fedoras and black and white wing tips, maybe a few women in chiffon. But what I found instead was a group of probably three hundred dancers of all ages, races, and ethnicities.

This past weekend, San Francisco was host to something called a Dance Exchange—think dance convention. 2,000 swing dancers from all over the US converged on the city for three days and nights of swing-a-ling fun. In part, this explained the huge turn out this last Sunday, though I’m told that Lindy in the Park (www.lindyinthepark.com) usually pulls in about one hundred dancers every week.

Swing dancing is not hip, but I mean that as high praise. If you think about it, a lot of things that are considered hip, smart, and alternative usually include a good bit of sulking and swimming in black pools of angst. Hey, nothing wrong with that. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fellow swimmer. But after giving it some thought, maybe it’s not so bad to have some alternative cultural activities that stress uninhibited, non-drug induced glee. Maybe unhip happiness is the new alternative.

For me, I’m still deciding if I should go back. After asking people why they took the time out of their lives to learn what seems like a pretty technical dance, each person, in his or her own way, said the same thing: connection. “It’s a three-minute romance,” one of the dancers told me. And that’s the line that has stuck with me since.

If you can dig down under the piles of cynicism that the world heaps on you daily, you know what this woman is talking about and you get a much better feel for why all of these dancers were smiling. In cities, even friendly ones like San Francisco, the opportunity to find three-minute romances that stress the romance and not the quickness may not be a bad thing. “Connect,” the poet once said, “always connect.”

the Taoist gets some writing work…

go check out the blog I’m writing for–my last entry about hip hop and corporate life is up and running on

http://monstertradeshowdisplays.com/

Hey, even Taoists need paying gigs…

What Ms. Tyra Banks Has Taught Me

The other day, I was working on a blog entry for http://monstertradeshowdisplays.com a blog about…yeah you guessed it, trade show displays.)  I’ve never stopped to think of what ads do to us—how they affect us.  The ad I was writing about had this giant face—an attractive woman looked on at me—as if the face were the product itself.  Because the other blog I write for i not mine and is geared towards commerce, I kept my thoughts focused on what it means to have an ad that basically sells an image more than a product—GO CHECK IT OUT!!  But for this entry, I decided to go another route.  You see, while looking a giant ad with a sexy woman looking back at me, it hit me that the experience was not much different from looking at a porno.  The lesson came home for me the other day when my girlfriend made me watch an episode of America’s Next Top Model (ANTM).

I can safely say that my girlfriend would not have put the two together.  Though she’d be pleased as all get out if I sat down and watched Tyra and Co. giggling and cackling for hours on end, she would not like it if I kicked back and put a porn into the DVD player.  But if you think about it, aside from the sex itself, most people watch porn for the same reason that they look at ads like the giant Chanel ad I was writing about, or the ads that Ms. Tyra & Co. put out all the time.  We want to look at faces looking at us in longing, mysterious ways.  We want to move people and we want to know it.  And if that means buying Chanel, or whatever, then so be it.

If you watch ANTM for any amount of time, you see a group of wannabes who hang on everything Ms. Tyra says because they want their chance to appear in an ad like the one I’m talking about.  On the show, Ms. Tyra spews out a whole lot of lame fortune cookie wisdom about the modeling life, but the much more interesting material comes when she speaks about the craft of modeling itself.  For anyone who thinks that it’s easy, think again.  You have to be a certain kind of person.  You have to look at the camera and without words convey whatever emotion the photographer yells out, and you have to do this while while hot lights shine down on you.  (Kind of like porn if you think about it.)

But even in our image saturated world, we have to admit that there’s probably no way you can really convey genuine emotion in that split second when the camera’s shutter clicks.  Look at one of these ads if you don’t believe me.  Really look at the person.  Don’t ask yourself what she’s trying to communicate.  You have no way of knowing that.  The better question to ask yourself is why you think she’s communicating the emotion you think you’re picking up on.  Why do you think she looks like she’s longing for someone?  Why do you think she looks sad, sexy, etc.? 

More than likely, the expression you’re looking at is neutral—so neutral that it can be anything you want it to be, and that’s the trick.   Some of us (mostly men) will stare and wish we were the recipients of whatever emotion we want to believe the pretty face is conveying, and some of us (our wives, girlfriends, moms and sisters) will hope that they too can be mysterious like her.  In either case, we will remember that these feelings all are due to the product the picture’s selling.  That’s the goal of the mass production photo.  That’s the craft of the modeling business.

 In the end, I guess I should thank Ms. Tyra and Ms. Chanel.  I, for one, am going to stop looking at this picture, walk away when my girlfriend asks me to watch ANTM, and yes, I’m even going to get rid of the porn.  It’s time for some real faces and some real emotion.

Now, what about you?     

 

Spy Films for a New America

In Traitor, Don Cheadle plays Samir Horn, who through the course of much of the film remains an unknown quantity.  He is an American ex-Special Forces soldier, a Muslim who seems sympathetic to terrorists, a weapons trader with no real ideology or country of allegiance, and he may or may not be a CIA operative gone bad.  The supposed challenge of the film—the reason why critics are calling this a thinking man’s Bourne Identity—is to figure out what Samir Horn truly is.  But that’s not it at all.  The true challenge of the film runs deeper.  Traitor asks us to define for ourselves what it means to betray one’s government—what we mean when we say someone is one of us.  

Director and writer Jeffrey Nachmanoff does not make the task easy.   Often, spy movies present characters that we have to put into boxes.  They usually make the exercise easy because we only have to decide if the character in question is good or bad—the assumption being that we in the audience already know what those terms mean.  In a movie treating the Middle East, good means us, our side, the West, whereas bad is them, the Muslim, the East.  But what if these categories were mixed up, made a bit muddier?  That’s what Traitor does, and does well.

Traitor is not a perfect movie by any means.  As we follow Samir and watch him involve himself in plots to kill innocent Americans, we are forced to see the other side of the argument against Islamic extremists.  Problem is Nachmanoff does this in a facile manner.  We are shown young, naive Muslim men being indoctrinated by cynical elders who call down the history of America’s many crimes in the region.  Regardless of whether we agree with those arguments, they ring hollow because they seem gratuitous, as if the director wants to make sure we understand that the issues presented are not black and white.  But Cheadle’s Samir has already confused good and bad for us.  He does not allow us to choose between good and bad, us and them, because he is both. 

Through Samir, we are forced to examine two things we don’t usually look at in our spy movies: race and religion.  And in this way, Traitor is much more pertinent to our current situation than other spy movies of the recent past.  A character like Jason Bourne, we can safely assume, is a good Anglo-Saxon man, and though not much of a church-goer, if he did ever make it to a service on Sunday, he’d probably not be anything more exotic than a Lutheran.  Who cares anyway?  His enemies are as clear cut as he is.  He’s blond, blue-eyed, and even when he speaks a foreign language, he does so with an American accent.  He’s definitely one of us.

In Traitor, we’re not so sure.  Samir is African born, raised by an American mother in Chicago, but a mother who wears a head scarf.  In a scene early in the movie, he is asked what language he dreams in, and he replies that he does so in English.  Yet he reads and speaks Arabic, and the color of his skin allows him to blend in as he walks through the alleys and hidden corners of the Middle East.  Could this kind of character truly be American then?  

Traitor does pose an answer to this question, though we might be surprised by it.  The thing that makes Samir American is not his language or his American mother; it is his Muslim faith.  It is his faith that makes him fight for his country and try to protect the innocent, whereas it is his Americanness, his belief in our government that makes him kill, transforming him into something truly foreign to us. 

That’s the paradox of the movie, and that’s what pushes Traitor beyond others in the spy genre.  In the Bourne series and others like it, the argument seems to be that one man can rid the tree of a few bad apples.  Traitor pushes farther and asks us to own the tree and to look at it for ourselves. 

 

The Most Inclusive Hour of the Week

Tango and yoga classes are the New Religion.   

It may just be another phase, I know.  I’m certainly not trying to say that these two seemingly different hobbies are going to replace temples and churches any time soon.  For that matter, you could probably add a lot of other hobbies to the list.  Maybe running or Pilates, or sailing a model boat in Golden Gate Park—these are also eligible.  The point here is that on any given Sunday, some of the most reverential behavior to be found in the city is not to be found in a house of worship. 

For myself, as a tango dancer and occasional yoga do-er, I’ve noticed that people seem to need to exercise their reverence muscles in some capacity, and that Sunday yoga/tango classes, though very different in nature, are similar in one way: they offer people a place to be über earnest.  Take, for example, the fact that the people who go to yoga and tango go through a transformation as they ready themselves for class.  Like church, loud is bad in the dance/yoga studio.  The real yogi/tanguera is sure to turn off her cell phone, and she expects the same of you.  She also expects that you turn off your loud laugh, and your enthusiastic voice, and any other vocal tick that could pierce the penumbra of whispered goodness that is the studio space. 

Once you’re in that quiet place, she also expects that you choose the right class for yourself.  You’ll find that the tango/yoga communities are open to new converts, but, like any religious community, humility is stressed.  Know your place.  If you can’t do a headstand, don’t take an intermediate Kundalini class.  If your ochos suck, in the name of all that’s holy, get yourself to the introductory tango workshop.  Spiritual perfection takes years.  Same can be said of a perfect Warrior II position, or an elegant turn.  Be humble, and you’ll soon reach dance/yogic enlightenment. 

Lastly, and perhaps most important for the novice, make sure your mind is open to new experiences.  Just like you wouldn’t start laughing at a priest whose converting wine into blood, or chuckle when a rabbi tells you to abstain from your favorite cheeseburger, when you enter the Holy of Holies studio, don’t giggle when your instructor tells you things that at first strike your funny bone.  For example, while your legs are wobbling underneath you, she might tell you to allow for your solar plexus to be filled with light and goodness.  Or, while you’re feeling like a clumsy elephant, your tango master might quietly remark, tango is life; tango is passion. 

You may have doubts.  Every one does at first.   But let them go.  That’s what the yogi/tanguera expects of you, and you can’t join either community if you don’t accept. Remember, yoga/tango people won’t burn you at the stake for your disbelief, but the bad vibes you might get are pretty painful, all the same. 

Can I get a hallelujah?