On Saturday night, the Imperial Council of San Francisco held its annual Mister and Miss Gay San Francisco pageant, and it was a night of song, dance, and several nipples.
When the glitter had settled, the city had new reigning champs: Kit Tapata and Patty McGroin. They will represent the city at fundraisers for a zillion different charities throughout the coming year; click on through for some photographic highlights.
Dean Rader is the hot poet of the moment around here; totally the Paris Hilton of everything that Paris Hilton isn't. Minibio: He's from Western Oklahoma. He formerly held the post of dean at the University of San Francisco, where he still teaches, briefly causing him to be Dean Dean. Bail-bonding runs in his family. He seems obsessed by the Frog and Toad books. Are these the elements that led him to a life of hardcore poetry? Where the hell else would they lead a man? (Drugs and/or religion.)
No. 85: Francesca Zambello
Tuesday marks the opening of the first of San Francisco Opera's three performances of Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung. Commonly known as the Ring Cycle, this series of four operas requires superlative talent in all facets of the production, beginning with the director's coherent, probing artistic vision.
This Ring is in the capable hands of Francesca Zambello, a renowned director of theater and opera whose 27-year career includes productions at the Met, La Scala, and Covent Garden. It's telling that even someone with Zambello's résumé would only half-jokingly describe the Ring as a director's "Mount Everest, but also Opera Armageddon."
File this under: Too odd to live in obscurity. A film crew from Portland brought a Seattle man to the Sierra to put hooks in his flesh, suspend him from a hot air balloon, and film it. See for yourself in the clip above. Considering that we know people who take great pleasure from various BDSM activities including putting hooks through their flesh, that part isn't especially shocking. But from a balloon? Holy Toledo.
There's much to learn about the real world from the fantasy world of HBO's Game of Thrones series. Set in Westeros, a made-up medieval kingdom where the battles take place offscreen but the whoring is always on it, the gritty series -- like the excellent George R.R. Martin novels it's based on -- offers much helpful instruction for the attentive.
For example: horse heads are detachable; horse hearts are delectable. Also: Spoiler alerts actually matter sometimes, because whoo, boy, if people told you what was coming in episode nine rather than let you hit it yourself, you should find yourself a Needle and stick 'em with the pointy end.
Anyway, here are five real-life lessons, all of which presume you've seen through last Sunday's show:
Be Specific.
When demanding that a vicious and literal-minded warlord king grant you a golden crown, it's best to specify which crown you mean. Adding, "By this I mean the one across the Narrow Sea that is in fact my birthright and not the one you might improvise out of melted ingots" is simply the kind of effective communication management demands.
You don't have to pick a special day on Market Street to be yelled at by strangers. And it's not that unusual to encounter those in odd outfits trying to sell you objects and services of ostentatious uselessness. But Saturday, the "Cries of San Francisco" put on by
Southern Exposure offered a witty and sometimes touching variant on an old theme based on The Cries of London, Francis Wheatley's seminal 18th-century oil paintings depicting London's street sellers.
While the original criers sold necessities such as fruit, hardware, and furniture repair, and advertised their wares by "crying" over the marketplace din, the crowd at Mint Plaza adopted a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward what constitutes "necessity." Peter Max Lawrence sat at the Paper Waster Press, doodling on a stack of 8" by 10"s. Some drawings he sold. Most simply alighted from his desk and blew about the plaza. The efforts put forth by Lawrence and others were skillful and impressive, and the only drawback to the larger spectacle was an undercurrent of smart-alecky dismissal of what were identified as society's serious problems.
The obligatory cum shot is a known thing. But the cock shot, at least as far as new cellphone technology is concerned, is something more recent. For those not in the know, the cock shot is a personal photo of a man's business taken by a phone camera posted via text, Twitter, or Facebook.
This was recently made famous by U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-New York), a liberal and potential candidate for mayor of New York City, who sexted an image of his tented shorts to six women. Oddly, this has become a sex scandal. But happily for Weiner, he is not the only man of note who enjoys making his intentions known. Kanye West has been a hot press subject lately for his alleged habit of sending naked photos to women on MySpace.
