I received this email from a friend, and this is the film that won a
First place award at Cann Film Festival, first of this category to be awarded at this festival. For those of you out of San Diego, please look for it in your area.
Shahri
Please go and see this movie/documentary (Bowling for Columbine). It
even touches on mosadegh and Iran. You will be shocked by this Michael Moore project. it will touch you and make you think. it is showing even during the day time hours. It is showing in hillcrest at the landmark hillcrest cinema 3965 5th Ave, San Diego, CA 92103 you will be glad you did not miss it.
posted by admin on:
10/18/02
Bowling for Clombine
Interesting and Educational Movie about Clombine Shooting.
To watch the movie:
Westwood Telephone # (310)208-3259
West Hollywood Telephone #(323)848-3500
Encino Telephone #(818)981-9811
South Pasadena Telephone #(626)799-9567
Orange County -Irvine Telephone # (800)555-tell
posted by admin on:
08/17/02
Sex Trade
Dispatches from the sex trade's front lines A signing featured three who chronicled their escapades. Is the book world developing a thing, or just having a fling?
By Carlin Romano
INQUIRER BOOK CRITIC
06/05/2002
The Philadelphia Inquirer
There's probably no "Sex Worker Lit" section yet in your local bookstore, but don't be smug.
You may remember a few other trends - legal and illegal - that started in this cutting-edge town, which now bans smoking in any internal space.
Judging by the perfectly respectable crowd drawn recently by the "Sex Worker Literati" reading here at artsy Black Oak Books (a neighbor of
both Lawrence Ferlinghetti's legendary City Lights Bookstore and the enduring palaces of San Francisco's stripper scene), this "genre
roadshow" could be coming to a bookstore near you, too.
"Inevitably, they put you in front of the children's book section," joked author David Henry Sterry, eyeing the reading's odd interior design. His
memoir, Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Young Man for Rent (Regan Books), recalls a teenage year he spent as a gigolo in L.A. Despite the panel's
awkward placement, Sterry and his two co-panelists - Lily Burana, a journalist whose Strip City (about her seven years as a professional
stripper) was named a best book of 2002 by several national publications, and Shawna Kenney, an L.A.-based journalist whose I Was a Teenage
Dominatrix (Retro Systems Books) recounts experiences from the five-year college job that paid her tuition - were present to read highly polished
material and talk about taboos that still affect the publication of sex-themed trade books.
Those taboos undoubtedly continue to weaken. One of publishing's most talked-about books at the moment, for instance, is French art critic
Catherine Millet's The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (Grove), a memoir of her decades of unapologetic promiscuous sex. To the surprise of few, it
seemed, none of the three S. F. sex literati read particularly graphic passages from their works (perhaps because the intendeds of both Sterry
and Kenney sat loyally in the second row, beaming like proud significant others anywhere).
Kenney offered a funny yet moving section of her book that focused on an older client who'd lost his wife and would pay her simply to talk.
Sterry, who once worked as a barker for the Garden of Eden men's club across the street, turned performance artist as he recited a kind of
stand-up routine based on his book, entertainingly tracing the contradictions of escorting older women right after enrolling as a student at Immaculate Heart College.
Burana, perhaps the most sociologically acerbic of the three, foreshadowed some of her later comments by presenting a section with
sharply observed portraits of women in the escort biz.
At this reading, however, the Q&A session took pride of place. "Don't hesitate to ask really rude questions," Sterry declared. While the
typically respectful bookstore audience didn't accommodate, the civil queries drew out many of sex-worker lit's contradictions and oddities.
Both Sterry and Burana, for instance, reported that publishers and booksellers want their sexually themed books to be very precisely
targeted. Sterry said he'd lost a reading engagement at a gay bookstore in San Francisco's Castro District after the owner read his ambiguously titled book and realized it had nothing to do with gay sex.
Burana, a statuesque blonde in tight halter top whose credentials include contributing editorships at New York Magazine and Spin, explained that
she'd lost her initial book contract with a major New York house when, as a woman with bisexual experiences, she refused to cut out passages that
referred to a former girlfriend. All three authors confided that they had experienced difficulty with distribution or marketing of their books in
more conservative parts of the country.
As the questions grew not rude, but personal, the internal conflicts of becoming a "sex-lit" writer emerged.
They told stories about their families' eminently normal reactions, usually starting with utter shock, then moving on to guarded support.
Kenney's mother "didn't know what a dominatrix was."
"She's religious," the author commented, "so we didn't talk for a long time."
Burana, whose mother is a librarian, noted that Mom "comments on all the reviews. You know, 'Well, that wasn't very generous.' " She remarked that you could gauge her parents' conditional support by their buying the
Playboy issue in which she posed with "Women of the Internet," then refusing to "take it out of the wrapper."
No one expressed shame or regret about past work or literary choices.
Sterry noted what he called "the stripperization of the public," an observation Burana quickly pounced on. Both the video revolution and the popularity of scantily clad teenage divas like Britney Spears, she
argued, had mainstreamed stripper culture into America's teen clothing shops.
When she first started stripping, Burana continued, she had to go to specialty stores for the outfits. "Now," she quipped, "you can go to any
teen-y store." That mainstreaming, Burana suggested, along with the boom
in upscale men's clubs for business types, has probably made stripping in America less "outre," as she put it, than it was in Gypsy Rose Lee's time.
All three, nonetheless, confessed to fear that honest writing about sex work could lead to their being typecast by publishers as they attempt
subjects unrelated to sex - a direction in which all are headed.
For that reason, Kenney said, she has decided "not to cover sex stories so much," and is editing an anthology on women and body image. Sterry's
new agent wants him to do a second book that "has nothing to do with the sex business." That's fine with Sterry, since he describes Chicken as an
attempt to lift a "black cloud" that has hung over his life for 25 years.
Burana sounded least fearful about stereotyping, preferring to make the more traditional writerly point that there's "only so far you can go" with material "before it exhausts itself." Questioned more closely about her choices, Burana also came nearest to voicing some of society's more
conventional judgments about sex work's pros and cons.
Her seven years of stripping, she acknowledged, was "a big chunk of developmental time to give over to a very brutal business." She knew it
was time to get out, she admitted, when she began to listen to herself defending it.
"I was just yelling too loud about how great it was," Burana said, "and I don't think I was trying to convince other people."
