Archival still of Angelo Caviglioni, Tato (pseudonym of Guglielmo Sansoni) and Marinetti, Bologna, 1920-22, Rovereto, Italy; © Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Archivio del ‘900, Fondo Tullio Crali

This week sees the arrival at last of the SFMOMA LiveArt/Performa 09 collaboration, METAL+MACHINE+MANIFESTO. Events started Wednesday evening with a symposium at the Italian Cultural Institute and continue through the weekend here at SFMOMA and elsewhere. Open Space has already seen some significant discussion of the project a few weeks back. Here, a Q/A round-robin between art historian, critic, curator and Performa founder RoseLee Goldberg; literary critic Marjorie Perloff; and our curator of public programs Frank Smigiel. RoseLee began with a question to each of the others:

ROSELEE TO MARJORIE PERLOFF

I couldn’t agree more with Marinetti’s comment, “Down with women fainting all over the place!” —but I also couldn’t agree less with his insistence on “scorn for women.” Was his scorn in fact for fragile “fainting women” or was he plainly misogynist? Is it possible to re-think the idea of the Futurist woman, or to offer a revisionist history in this regard?

Marinetti’s scorn was not for “woman” as such but for the whole business of Romantic love—the pretense that sex didn’t exist but that the beloved woman was an object of worship, still in the tradition of courtly love. The best thing to read regarding RoseLee’s question is Marinetti’s hilarious essay “Down with the Tango and Parsifal,” subtitled “A circular Letter to some cosmopolitan women friends who give tea-dances and who Parsifalize themselves.” Here Marinetti spoofs the Tango, then the popular new dance:

“Monotony of seductive, swaying hips, between the flashing eyes and Spanish daggers of de Musset, Hugo, and Gautier. . . . The last manic yearnings of a sentimental, decadent, paralyzing Romanticism for the cardboard cut-out femme fatale.”

And he added, “Down with the tango and its cadenced swoons. Are you really convinced there’s a lot of pleasure to be had, gazing into each other’s mouths and ecstatically examining each other’s teeth, like a pair of hallucinating dentists?” There follows a comic link between the Tango and Wagnerian opera with such great love scenes as that between Tristan and Isolde. Throughout, the emphasis is on sublimated sex as something false and dishonest.

Far from having scorn for woman, Marinetti felt women deserved better than such sentimental posturing. He was not at all a misogynist. But it is true that, so far as art cenacles were concerned, Marinetti’s group was entirely—and aggressively—masculinist. Women played a very peripheral role although his second wife, Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, was a fine artist in her own right and the two worked closely together: see Lucia Re’s biography of 1998. In assessing the sexism of the Italian Futurists, bear in mind that the Dada artists of the Cabaret Voltaire were not very different—again, an almost all-male group, bonding with one another. To find a different treatment of gender, one must look at Russian Futurism where women played a major role.

ROSELEE TO FRANK SMIGIEL

We’re thrilled that you were in New York for Performa 05 and Performa 07, and that we now have a kindred spirit in San Francisco who is as excited as we are about performance in the 21st century. One of the major reasons I started Performa in New York was to re-ignite a 1970s ethos of artists from different disciplines coming together. Do you see the possibility for re-igniting a community in San Francisco, of the kind that we associate with City Lights and the radical literary scene there in the 1960s?

As someone with a relatively modest tenure in the Bay Area so far, I wouldn’t put myself in a position—at least not yet—to gauge the recent history, current temperature, and larger perception of the arts communities here. I will note that a sense of belatedness often clings to conversations about cultural production, with long-standing San Franciscans telling me, simply:  “you missed it; the dot.com boom killed everything.” If City Lights itself soldiers on in North Beach, it’s easy to find agreement that the tech bubble fundamentally disrupted a local ethos of experimentation, radical politics, and signature forms of collaboration and circulation. Money changes everything, the old story goes, and luxury condos + soaring rents = an artistic mass-migration, in this case to LA, Portland, or Berlin.

For an insightful account of this felt transformation in Bay Area culture, I’d start with Rebecca Solnit’s Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism, which tracks this pivotal moment and highlights the way not only artists but also the heady mix of characters, classes, and cultures that mingled and made culture here were in fact under siege by the bubbling new economy. After our most recent burst bubble, I must confess that cultural life can indeed feel precarious, threatened by the Google and Genentech buses moving our neighbors south to their still-working new economies but never depositing them in ATA, the Brava theater, or a Thursday night film screening at SFMOMA. And the real estate bubble burst seems not to have lowered anyone’s rents (mine just went up). Ghost neighbors ever-commuting and art houses with empty seats? Now there’s a scary cultural recipe.

If there’s a palpable desire in a city like New York to recapture the energy of its economic ebb in the 1970s, a moment when decline fueled an explosion in artistic practice & possibility, I’m not sure I feel a yearning in the Bay Area to recapture a 50s Beat moment, a 60s counter-culture moment, or a 70s conceptual moment. A pre-dot.com moment, maybe, but then what would such mean and look like? I’m very excited by Jens Hoffman’s course for Joseph Del Pesco’s Pickpocket Almanack, “The Center of the Periphery,” which will examine RoseLee’s question here in greater depth. There’s also the long conversation here about the fate of New Langton Arts, and what the situation for this key San Francisco art space means for arts in the Bay Area.

In my own provisional answer about new types of energy & enthusiasm, I find myself drawn, again and again, to the means by which artists here build their own infrastructures. Neighborhood Public Radio. Center for Tactical Magic. Queens Nails Projects. Future Farmers. It seems that “community” or “audience” or “public” or even “alternative space” are something artists now build too.

With Tanya Zimbardo’s recent post in mind, examining Jim Pomeroy and the institutional v. alternative art space divide, the question for me, at SFMOMA, is how artists might use the museum too. Can we bring something to a complicated plumbing that someone else is building? A plumbing we don’t, ultimately, own? How can the museum be a platform for projects that might be bigger than it is? Or a stage for artists interested in what we contribute and not what we contain? Pomeroy’s desired “one night stand,” at last?

To RoseLee then, a question does remain for me about the model of artistic culture imagined in so many invocations of 1970s New York. For me, and for many artists I know, the era presents such a seductive story and study. Yet Marinetti would certainly not approve of our backwards glance. Would Matta-Clark? Do you? Can you say something about the key values of that era—and how those values continue to engage us? Especially against that of the Futurist example, whose rhetoric & images we might find difficult to take up, at best?

[stay tuned for response from RoseLee, who's arriving in SF any minute]

[See post to watch Flash video]

William Kentridge’s restaging of Monterverdi’s The Return of Ulysses has been a collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa, and Pacific Operaworks in Seattle, with musical direction by Stephen Stubbs.  More reviews, for the curious, at Dwell, and at SF Classical Voice.

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The reunion of Ulysses and his son Telemachus is played out as a deathbed scene. L: Tenor Ross Hauck (Ulysses). R: Zachary Wilder (Telemachus). Photo: Aimee Friberg

L: Laura Pudwell (Penelope). R: Adrian Kohler, Handpring's master puppet designer and maker. Photo: Aimee Friberg

Above: Penelope offers Ulysses’s bow to potential suitors: whoever can bend the bow will win her hand. Of course none can. You can see here (I think) the way puppeteer and vocalist are collaborating on proper manipulation of the puppet. The vocalist is helping to carry the bow.

The set, with projection screen behind. Photo: Aimee Friberg.

As I understand it, Kentridge’s decision to seat the instrumentalists in a permanent wooden stage frame (resembling an operating theater) is quite innovative for productions of this kind,  solving a logistical problem of early baroque opera:  acoustic proximity of the singers and their accompanists. This operating-theater stage set also has the interesting effect of making the instrumentalists actors in the drama as well as accompanists AND ‘audience’. The actual audience tucked away in the dark on the theater seats completes the medical-theater audience—does this implicate the audience as actor too? Not really/not at all. The screen above the instrumentalists is a version of scenery flat, with Kentridge’s trademark animated charcoal drawings, as well as surgical footage (of open-heart surgery), barium x-rays, and live-action shots of waves, water, and clouds. With musicians, puppets, puppeteers, vocalists, animations,  and then the supertitles above, it was a lot to keep track of, but it was magical, I must admit.

Sorrily, the rest of the run is sold out.  If I can retrieve a video clip and post it up, I will. Many more pre-show and preview pictures here. Joshua Kosman’s Chronicle review is here.

Photo: Megan Brian

I ran over to Theater Artaud yesterday afternoon to catch a bit of the unloading of set and puppets for the William Kentridge + Pacific Operaworks + Handspring Puppet Company’s restaging of Claudio Monteverdi’s The Return of Ulysses.  In case you’ve missed this: Kentridge has brought us a puppet opera, being presented in conjunction with William Kentridge: Five Themes.  An amusing tidbit: there’d been a lot of rumors here that the puppets were being shipped in kid-size coffins, and until a few days ago we were gleefully awaiting the arrival of some morbid-looking little boxes. But of course, uh, musical equipment and the like: those heavy steel cases, carefully padded: they’re called “coffins”.

Photo: Megan Brian

No one had the key to unlock them yesterday, but we have a correspondent onsite at Artaud this morning who promises to try to get some pictures when the coffins are pried open. Many more pictures of the set being unloaded, and of the stage and theater before-the-fact, here. With the exception of Wednesday’s Opening Night Benefit Performance, tickets are, sadly, SOLD OUT.  We’ll post as many pictures and clips as we can at Flickr and here on the blog. More info on the SFMOMA presentation of the opera here.

But all of this began, for me, in many ways, with Weimar New York — and in Weimar, you can see the DNA of the Live Art series.

I might note that before New York and before Weimar, Earl Dax worked as a community organizer, at one time with LilyYeh’s Village for Arts and Humanities in North Philadelphia-a highly successful example of neighborhood-arts outreach and local transformation through the arts. Dax approaches Weimar New York as if it were a continuation of this earlier gig. Here’s Dax describing Weimar to Time Out New York: “I often refer to the work that I do as a kind of community organizing, among a community of artists that has been ravaged over the past 30 years by ongoing forces: gentrification, AIDS, defunding of the arts, the culture wars.”

Hickey “squealed”: “But it was not that way at all.” He goes on to imagine how the scene could be rightly rendered, in all its potential sentimentality, utopian promise, and real-life deal. He decides only Norman Rockwell or Johnny Mercer could have figured this one out, replete as they are “in an atmosphere of generosity and agreement,” albeit one always devoted to the exception and never the norm, one sensitive to the nuance and the individual, one critical of the category.

It is this spirit I always recognize in Weimar New York. Weimar is always many things: entertaining, educational, naughty, satirical, affirmative. It’s about complication and contradiction, not always consensus (though the Boos! at conservative politics are there too). It’s about history and the now. And it’s all these things because of who it gathers: an improvisational, unlikely, even outrageous cast of characters, who cook up a rhythm and riff just so. As my model for Live Art, Weimar nods to projects like these: the jam band that starts together, even if it ends apart.

“So all the muscle-boy artists and writers, they will become professors and darlings of professors, and they will teach the young to revere their pure, muscle-boy art, because it is good for them, and they will teach women and Jews and queers to make this muscle-boy art too. And it will be very pure, because they are muscle-boys and they don’t have to please anyone. So there will be no cabaret, no pictures, no fantasy or flashing lights, no filth or sexy talk, no cruelty, no melodies, no laughter, no Max Reinhardt, no Ur-Faust, no A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And nobody will love it.”

He also adds that “nobody will pay money to own it or see it” — because money is “a Jew thing, a queer thing, and a silly woman thing” — though it’s quite the artist’s thing. Herr Volbach concludes: “So all you Aryan muscle-boys down there at the end of the table, Don’t be Aryan muscle-boys! I have seen enough official culture. I will teach you how to hit your marks and set the lights and make the tempo float. The rest you will have to learn from women and queers — out in the dark.”

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Frank Smigiel is Associate Curator, Public Programs at SFMOMA, where he designs and implements artists’ talks & public projects, visual arts-based performance, and film.

You can see more pictures of Weimar New York: A Golden Gate Affair here.

Tell us about Your Weimar!

On November 4, we’ll be screening two democracy-themed projects by Bay Area artists. Chris Sollars’ documentary C RED BLUE J explores the red state/blue state divide of 2004, as Chris juggles his beliefs with those of a sister working for the Bush administration, a born-again Christian father, and a lesbian mother. I Want You (Auditions) is Tony Labat’s new work, culled from footage of the original I WANT YOU performances. I asked them to interview each other for the blog & they typed their conversation together in real time in Tony’s studio Weds afternoon. Chris & Tony, thanks! and xxxooo, SS

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2:03 PM At the post office.  Only two postal workers and all self-service equipment disconnected and missing. Worst post office in the city and possibly the country.

2:09 PM Chris rides past construction at Mission and Cesar Chavez (Army) on the sidewalk where Tony Labat recorded immigrant workers from his studio across the street. The workers are no longer here but there is an ISO container with pipes attached.

2:11 PM Chris rings the Buzzer for Tony’s Studio and enters the building.

2:13 PM Tony offers Chris a beer and sits down to complete an email. Chris picks up the California Biennial Catalogue. It includes imagery of Tony’s surveillance of immigrant workers, a video still of a tank passing on a train (Blur 2007), and a photo of Tony standing next to a Wax Museum sculpture of Fidel Castro.

2:15 PM Tony “NO MORE JFK!” I am coordinating my flight with a gallery I am showing at in January and the last time I flew into JFK it cost me five grand for holding a Cuban passport and an American green card.

2:20 PM As Chris types Tony unloads a clip from his Black pellet gun, firing around the studio.

2:25 PM The phone Rings. Chris laughs…Tony shouts “TIMMY what do you think of Chris? Chris and I are think-tanking for this writing about both our projects for SFMOMA.“

2:57 PM Chris is just making up the time-lapse, but that’s okay, that’s the nature of time…impressed by his skills at typing, I’m a one finger (or two) typist…the phone rings it is Jennifer Locke…she is letting me know that she has cleared the problem with my check from St Mary’s College…Chris has a nice little gallery…Jennifer says “don’t say little.” Why? “Because he may be a little sensitive about size.” Am I getting my money? Yes…it was a mistake so it was a good thing you called me…Thanks Jennifer…

3:06 PM Chris asks about my sketch for an installation, he thinks that it looks like a voting booth…I find that very ironic…

3:07 PM Chris, Why did you make C RED BLUE J?

3:10 PM Just like political debates, before addressing the current question I will first address the comment made earlier, “Little”:  The exhibition space of 667 Shotwell is compromised by existing in a private home.

3:11 PM Interrupted by Tony swinging a dirty towel around the studio swatting flies. Caliber and quality of works: from democratic dinners voted by and prepared by the People with Jerome Waag, the whole backroom of 667 Shotwell turned into an XMAS present to sit on Santa’s lap (with Pat Rock as Santa) Brian Storts, or the 50cent beer machine in the same room a couple years later by Rock and Storts, and most recently the show 10 year itch of SF underground music (videos, outfits, posters by John Dwyer, T.I.T.S, Numbers, Erick Landmark, and Mike Donovan of Sic Alps amongst others. “Little” in size, but busting at the seams.

3:18 PM OK Tony is now done with that towel. Anyway a lot of the music in C RED BLUE J is by John Dwyer and I integrated it into the film since I was listening to his music all during the past four—

3:20 PM But Chris…Why did you make C RED BLUE J ?

3:21 PM Probably as a way to cope with my sister… “Jennifer” working for BUSH. Turn it into something positive. To have a window into her life and ideology and to look at how she could work for HIM after the way we grew up. Mom is a lesbian. I always thought it ironic or fitting that here I am an artist in SF and she is working for Bush in DC… couldn’t be much more split than that. Family is often where we are confronted with opposing Political discourse.

3:23 PM RING Tony: Did you vote for Obama? You did already? Oh come on…

3:24 PM Felipe: “Chris, you have a nice ass”

3:25 PM Tony speaking in Spanish so as to hide his conversation from Chris…NUMERO UNO… Miami… XMAS… get Mom to LA… Fantasy…

3:25 PM “Havana to Miami, No way …then I am involved with Homeland Security again..”

3:31 PM Tony puts in the DVD for I WANT YOU.

C The HD makes them look as good as politicians on TV. Did you change the order in the editing?

T The order happened naturally. I wondered if it was going to have to be edited, but the order was so organic and natural I stayed with it.

C This gives new meaning to SPOT Light.

T The performer can’t see us, just the light and that darkness. And the X on the floor.

C I keep thinking that as our world becomes more and more digital I need to stay physical too. Tell me a little more about the I WANT YOU process.

T Part one: private auditions in front of the judges. Part two: I took myself out and the audience became the judges, American Idol/The Gong Show style. Part two became the spectacle. When I watched I kept thinking of what lines would be good for the posters. And was the audience rewarding the performance or the message? Part three will happen Monday Nov 3, when the posters of the winners go up all over town.

C Your film is totally inclusive. The good, the bad, the ugly; it also reminds me of the structure of the Democratic Convention when they invited average workers to speak their concerns, no matter how scripted.

T The posters come from the idea of common man propaganda. They use the voice of the everyday, like the participants. Similar to Joe the Plumber. Joe the Plumber is symbolic, but it didn’t work because it is Fake. Not a Joe, not a plumber.

C The symbol is effective though…

T But once Joe became tangible there was disappointment. Same with Sarah Palin: the “Hockey Mom” who then shops at Bloomingdales.

C Hypocrisy.  I WANT YOU is also similar to your work as a performer on the Gong Show. You went from participant to host. What year was that?

T 1978

C What month? (Chris is thinking that his sister was born that same year.)

T Ehhh?

C What season? Jennifer was born in June.

T In the Fall.

C Tony, watching I WANT YOU, I can’t help but think about performance and being on stage. I moved here in 1999 from the east coast, and one thing I wanted to ask you about is Performance. I myself feel like I make Actions, not… “I want to Perform”. For example, at an event put on by Brian Storts in March 1999, I wanted to intervene, and not be on stage. A lot of the artists I was meeting at that time were putting on performance events. One after the other…Perform…My audience for my actions has always been in the streets. It might not be as prevalent as it was in 1999, but why all this performance art in San Francisco?

T Wow…That’s IRONIC. I came to San Francisco in 1975 to study out here. Chris Burden, Tom Marioni, Terry Fox, Howard Fried, and I, I think we all were against “the stage.” Theater vs performance. In Studio 9 at SFAI in the 1970s there were all of these performances going on. At my core was a desire to deconstruct and investigate this apparatus, “the stage.” It was around this time I went on the Gong Show. I saw the Gong Show as a bridge between performance art and TV/theater on stage. What would it be like to have Karen Finley or Tony Labat on the Gong Show. Total subversion of the stage. I wanted to consider the potential of these other venues/ platforms or spaces. Karen and myself were using the stage as a platform. The stage is a pedestal. Just like in sculpture. Here in the film the stage and X marks the spot, becomes a soapbox/platform.

ON THE TV: A person bound in brown with tape around body is placed on the X on stage. There is a total breakdown with this. And The person starts screaching and screaming. The person walks to the edge of the stage and the crew comes back to keep the individual from falling off. The bound person falls to the floor and continues to thrash back and forth with screeching.

T The museum staff didn’t know how to handle this person…when to end or stop it. This person became a liability. Is this person in torture or is this performance? What do we do? The only way to end it in this context was, after several minutes, for me to say “thank you” and she stopped…I don’t know who it was. It seemed as if she wanted it to stop but was dependent on the context of the situation for it to end. It could have gone on for hours. This trust between performer and audience is similar to Acconci’s early works. Potential energy, possibility, and the “what if”…What if this energy is transferred…

C Transferred either within the performance or outside. All these words of potential directly relate to politics for me…

T Also, how does this potential energy transfer to language…Everyone is feeling this angst. Where are we going? What is happening? The Dow Jones is dropping. Ha Ha. And people laugh…But what if this energy was transferred or reached a boiling point.

C Just like everyone screaming “I am Mad as Hell! And I’m not Going to Take it ANYMORE!”

T What if these people started transferring this interior discomfort into strange behavior in the streets.

C This same internal struggle is reflected in my family. The characters of C RED BLUE J.

T The most compelling character for me was your Dad. He was an artist and had odd behavior. Which fascinated me. His archive of your childhood—from the toys he had made to the documentation of you growing up, that he had saved the toys. All of this is a formal idea of the ARCHIVE. To Document. To Record. The baby photos of you each month, with weight recorded.

C I think this is also why I am so preoccupied with this as an artist. But it was just as much my Mother. She wrote the month-to-month cards, and my weight, and told my dad to take pictures of that. As he was making our toys, my mom was making our clothes, especially for Halloween. These ideas of documentation, record, and time was presented to me very directly at an early age.

T The most significant thing for me is: “Why do we do This?” It’s like anthropology/archeology “What do we learn?” What is the purpose of what we do?

C Or what our family does? Why did my parents take the time and go to the trouble of documenting everything.

T That’s that open Ending…That makes it art. Mystery.

C I don’t like it when something is too completed or closed for me. Ohh I get it. Next, move on.

T We should transcend the didactic approach. That is what is good about the film:  it takes a open-ended approach. All the answers aren’t there. It’s Beautiful, complicated. The personal becomes universal and ceases to be about “ME.” It’s a Fucked up Country Right now.

C Nodding. That’s what I like about yours.

T Thanks.

C Our two works – there is an intent with democracy. You made a choice to use everyone [who auditioned] before selections were made, and not just the performance winners; the film isn’t about the journey of selection. With mine, even though editing is a manipulation, I tried to be more democratic in the construction of the conversation, bringing together the individual members of my family to have a conversation that wasn’t actually taking place. Your inclusion of all the participants creates a conversation between them. This democratizes it. Maybe even socializes it.

T You didn’t know the outcome of your film before starting?

C Nope

T This not knowing of outcome, becomes the glue for these works. This No Idea where it will lead. Artists are attentive to being detached but also completely invested.

C It seems that we both have social &  political interests but use non-traditional methods for communicating these concerns.

T Neither me nor you make communication a priority. We do something different…we like to …PUT IT THERE!…RIGHT HERE!

C No… I want you to… Here Deal with this. Here it is. Yes. I think that is also what I experienced with moving here in 1999 and seeing the performances. Here now perform. This kept me outside in the streets. I want everyday people to deal with my actions on the streets.

T All the performance that was happening at art school I took outside of its familiar context and took it to the Gong Show. I was seeing the overlap between art school and the Gong Show. So I went there and crossed over.

C You also present SFMOMA for performers in this way, offering them SFMOMA’s theater. It’s similar to your teacher Terry Fox’s work, inviting the bum to drink and sleep not in the street but in the basement of an art show. You invited the outside—”the street”—inside.

T Wow…Terry passed 3 weeks ago. He was always right here. Artworld to the street or the street to the artworld elites. This is also what I am doing with I WANT YOU, the film will be playing in the same space where these auditions took place. At the same site. It has potential to transcend.

C You’re building on history and also having the viewers watch the film through the actual space the performers stood. The screen is at the back of the stage not the front. You’re re-presenting these realities of this space through the mediation of your film…I mean Video.

T I’m a fucked-up TV kid.

C I am too… and now these other kids are coming along fucked up on tv, internet and other…

T Hopefully you’re a smarter TV kid learning from these things. And what I’ve noticed with performance that the performer is here…

two remotes on a table…Tony moves one 12 inches in front of the other…the artist is here.
Pointing to the one behind…the audience is sometimes here. And what needs to happen is for the audience to stay up with the artist…[but?] a lack of language…

C This word “potential” keeps coming up. It reminds me of the terminology from sculpture. With potential of material, potential of movement. Action etc. I don’t think of my work as performance but as actions or interventions.

T There is a lack of conversation in the terminology with these…Performance vs Action. America vs Europe. Action was traditionally more European based. And more formal. Is Laurie Anderson the defining artist for “performance”? There are differences that have been stated in manifestos & rules that have been ignored or consumed by theater.

C Yes.

C Hey tony

T Yeah

C I want you …

chris,

a bunch of years ago there was some performance event I think at the lab, and someone’s cell phone kept going off (in the audience), totally irritating everyone, and I thought that was the most brilliant performance of all (it was a performance, I think)

was that you?

All photos of the Labat I WANT YOU auditions by Aimee Friberg

Now of course SFMOMA can’t take an endorsement position on any local initiatives, but I’m glad to post Sadie’s video of her own winning performance, shot that night in the theater to a rowdy and supportive constituency:

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Sadie Lune is a multi-media artist, absurdist, sex worker and pleasure activist. She has performed with revolutionary sex artists Carol Queen, Annie Sprinkle, and Nina Hartley and is a co-founder of Paul Reubens Day. Sadie draws the comic series “Saturn Returns Komyx” for $pread magazine, and is working on an anthology of essays by the personal partners of sex workers. Her short film “Yum” won the People’s Choice award in the 2007 Good Vibrations Amateur Erotic Film Competition. Interactive interventionist social art totally gives Sadie a boner. She’s a recent convert to occasional blogging: writing sporadically for the comic blog BreakUp Girl as well as her own three (!) blogs: Sadie Wants a Wife, Whores in the Woods, and Working Hearts. Sadie identifies as a mermaid and is currently looking for collaborators, patrons, and a wife. She aspires to show more work in streets and museums. Sadie lives in the Mission District of San Francisco with her three snakes and her beloved roommate, Irene.

Kali Eichen has an extensive background in acting, dance, improvisation, and educational and technical theater. She is a writer who dabbles in short fiction, food blogging, and recipe development. Currently, she makes her living as a pastry chef – specializing in bacon desserts and caricature cakes.

Hazel White is a poet, journalist, and author; most of her work addresses landscape and the poetics of habitation. More privately, until now—the mouse rushed to the email “send” button, next thing she was at the I Want You auditions—she’s a transracially adoptive parent, and a fledgling anti-racism activist. She thanks her partner, her son, and her son’s birthfamily, and The UNtraining organization for helping her to explore racism and to find her urgent new voice.

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Beth Lisick has published poems, essays, and a short fiction collection; she wrote a weekly nightlife column for SF Gate for eight years. Her stage and screen collaborations with writer/performer Tara Jepsen have yielded some uncomfortable moments, most recently the short film Diving for Pearls. Beth co-organizes the Porchlight Storytelling Series, a monthly show for amateur storytellers in San Francisco. Her book Everybody Into the Pool was a New York Times bestseller; her latest book about her adventures in the self-help biz is called Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, 10 Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone.

Tara Jepsen is a writer and performer from San Francisco. She’s toured extensively with the all-female cabaret Sister Spit’s Rambling Road Show, and the short film Diving for Pearls (in collaboration with Beth Lisick), won “Most Innovative Short”  at the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (2004). She co-curates and co-hosts San Francisco’s longest running queer open mic, K’vetsh, with Kirk Read. Tara recently completed the first run of her live stage show, written and performed with Beth Lisick, Getting in on the Ground Floor and Staying There.

Don and Phil, or R. Donald Nash and Phil Spalding, hail from San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood, where they have been running their boutique design firm for over thirty years. They’ve worked with princes and princesses, real and figurative, and aren’t afraid to nudge a client toward a more adventurous chair. Though they’ve never fallen on the same side of the great Hummel vs. Lladro debate, they do agree on Italian opera, convertibles (preferably silver and Mercedes), and their shih tzus Betty and Veronica.