This post on BlogHer about dating in L.A. contrasts northern and southern California men:
“You know what you need?” she asked. “You need a founder. A smart guy in tech, a real guy who cares about that stuff in your head. You need a founder. I’m going to get you one. Girls like us, we know too much for Hollywood to get us. We’ll go find some founders…”
Welp, Oracle’s in town again, and the city’s crawling with tech geeks. Now’s your chance.
It’s been a cold, foggy, blowy day. The sun never came out, and tourists hurried into souvenir shops and Walgreens to buy crappy beige SAN FRANCISCO sweaters and hoodies. On days like today you wonder how the hell the city ever became known as the capital of free love, unless it was the urge to get back into bed, and when two people had the same idea, then… Yeah, that would work.
This morning I went to my favorite café, Progressive Grounds at 21st and Bryant. As I sat there reading The Savage Detectives I became aware of a woman with a braying voice having a loud phone conversation — unusual at that café. “I’m twenty-six,” she was saying. “I’ve got long hair, almost down to my ass. I’m 36 double-D. I’m real pretty, I work at Centerfolds…”
I looked up. The speaker was a frankly ugly woman with thin, straight shoulder-length hair. She was in her mid-30s at least, fat, and dressed like a Capp St. hooker in a dirty pinkish party dress and a bright pink puffy jacket. She had on weird hookerish tinted glasses and high-heeled shoes, and she was saying “I just got off work at 4:00 a.m. Yeah, I have pictures on disk that I can send you. Well, what are you looking for? No, I don’t have a cell phone camera. Well, why is that important?”
Then the party she was talking to apparently hung up. The woman went to the counter and ordered a complicated vanilla latte with lots of whipped cream. (The staff at the café treated her with as much respect and politeness as they treat everyone, I noticed. Did I say I really like that café?) Then she took her drink back to the table and, with her finger on an advertisement in the back pages of the SF Weekly, phoned another potential employer.
I was thinking two things at the same time: She is atrocious, but also, she is awesome. She had probably never been pretty. Her voice sounded like the dregs at the bottom of a bottle of beer. But she was working that camera-less mobile phone and lying up one side and down the other about how gorgeous she was. What was the point? What were people going to say when she actually showed up at whatever strip club or massage parlor she was calling? Did she look in the mirror and see herself as she described herself? And how much of the way we all present ourselves is mostly bluff and squinting in the mirror and hoping that other people never call us on it?
After the second phone call she checked her messages, collected her things, and departed.
Courtesy Salon’s Broadsheet blog, I caught this NYT story on a cultish Folsom Street community, One Taste, in which fully clothed men daily get women off before breakfast. Not to be confused with the Center for Sex and Culture’s Masturbate-a-thon (it’s not til May 2).
Justin Juul of the SF Bay Guardian reported on One Taste last month, making it sound like the worst hell imaginable. “We spent the rest of the afternoon doing one-on-one vulnerability exercises,” is only one sentence from the sad tale. I was reminded of the legendary men-only workshops taught in the 1990s by a well-known San Francisco performance artist, who made his naked attendees stand in a circle with their dicks tied together with string to demonstrate their interdependence. Scissors were not permitted in the room, alas.
New in town? Made a New Year’s resolution to uncover the San Francisco sex underground but don’t know where the hellmouth is? Then get over to the Perverts Put Out reading on Friday, where you can hear and meet several leading lights of the scene, and their acolytes. MCs are Carol Queen and Simon Sheppard, and reading are Charlie Anders, Greta Christina, Stephen Elliot, Shar Rednour, Kirk Reed, Thomas Roche — and it wouldn’t be San Francisco without somebody with a made-up name — one “horehound stillpoint,” all lower case please.
The event’s at 7:30pm at CounterPulse, 1310 Mission Street, and costs $10-15.
I saw that occasional SF Metblogs contributor and relentless self promoter and sex book author Violet Blue is the latest recipient of the tempest in a web teapot award. The LA Times website has David Sarno covering a fracas in which any Violet Blue mentions or posts have been deleted from Boing Boing and it’s archives.
Writes Sarno:
“I’ve been wracking my brain thinking of what issues I might’ve come down on the wrong side of,” Blue told me on the phone. “There’s been no argument, there’s been no disagreement, no flame war, none of the usual things.”
Could Boing Boing really be a Stalin era throwback that wants to erase it’s own history, and somehow have the world to believe the widely read SF Gate columnist doesn’t exist?
At AdRants they speculated a possible conflict with blog ad provider Federated Media, which seemed somewhat unlikely to be involved in editorial concerns (IMHO ) since they supply ads for dozens of popular sites including the Metblogs network.
BoingBoing eventually issued it’s own terse comment and explanation after the web “sh*tstorm” lapped up on it’s serenely acerbic shores:
“[Violet’s] posts were removed from public view a year ago. Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her. It’s our blog and so we made an editorial decision, like we do every single day. We didn’t attempt to silence Violet. We unpublished our own work. There’s a big difference between that and censorship.”
Read the LA times blog, or for a more concise semi ad biz related wrap up read more at AdRants.
Today’s the annual San Francisco version of Carnaval — always the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, since its traditional Mardi Gras date happens in February when the weather is likely to be horrid here — featuring squads of be-feathered dancing girls and boys cavorting and shimmying down Mission St. It’s a great parade, if you’ve never seen it. And if you miss it, just check Flickr in a few hours. (Update: try the 2008carnaval tag.)
Also today, conveniently beginning a few hours after the parade of nearly-naked people: the annual Masturbate-a-thon, a benefit for the Center For Sex and Culture. It starts at 3:00 pm, features live performances by real porn stars, and is open to all persuasions. Interestingly, it costs $20 to participate — and $40 to just watch.
