"I'm so not a film person," says Chilean director Sebastián Silva, leaning into a couch at FilmHouse in the Fillmore, where for two weeks this month he's the San Francisco Film Society's artist in residence. "It's almost a coincidence that I'm making movies. I still don't know how to talk about cameras or lenses or all that."
What if you came up with a premise to try and save your reality show franchise -- a last-ditch effort to try and preserve a legacy -- and it crashed and burned? This, gentle reader, is what we are witnessing with The Real World San Francisco right now. The "Ex-Plosion" is nothing but a sad whimper, and a coda to this once-great reality show.
For many of us, whether we find a cute hookup for the upcoming weekend is the difference between finding a cutie on Tinder and... not finding a cutie on Tinder.
People to whom this sounds all too familiar will be surprised to learn that there are a variety of different dating sites for even the pickiest of people. Did you know there's a skiiingsingles.com, for skiing aficionados who want to find someone who shares their love of winter sports? What about uniformdating.com, for people who want to to date a police officer or a firefighter?
Leading relationship expert and author of Sexual Euphoria, George Moufarrej, told us all about how to find the perfect dating site.
If you've walked through Bernal Heights recently, you may have noticed that one of the houses has its garage door open to reveal enormous wooden sculptures, standing anywhere from nine to 25-feet-tall.
These unique pieces of artwork belong to Bernie Lubell, an artist whose interactive wooden installations have been shown in Austria, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and all over the Bay Area, most recently alongside Scott Weaver's toothpick model of San Francisco at the Exploratorium. Lubell's sculptures combine engineering and creativity to create huge kinetic structures people are encouraged to play with in order to "become actors in a theater of their own imagining."
"I've always had a penchant for the way things work," Lubell says.
The Write Stuff is a series of interview profiles conducted by Litseen, where authors give exclusive readings from their work.
Jennifer S. Cheng received her MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa and her BA in English from Brown University. She has a ranking system for her favorite kinds of eggs (crystal, steamed, thousand-year, poached, over-medium, scrambled), and she can be found in the ether at jenniferscheng.com.
What's your biggest struggle -- work or otherwise?
In terms of writing, I struggle, as I'm sure many writers do, with confidence, with being brave, with feeling like I can or should carve out a space in which to exist. I guess that really goes beyond writing. It makes it difficult to chase after things or feel like I deserve them. There is the struggle to give my body authority and ownership.
Do you consider yourself successful? Why?
As I grow older, I am starting to think it's less about legitimizing oneself through some socially constructed notion of success and more about the process of breathing. I recently watched the film Gravity three times because I kept having a strangely emotional, bodily reaction to it, and there are specific reasons for this, but at some point in the film I thought: I just want to hold some earth in my hands. That's really sentimental and cheesy, I don't care. I want to know something beautiful, and maybe that's enough.
