OK, we all know about the free election-daze bevvies at Starbuck's and gratis donuts at Krispy Kreme (if you're so hot for free caff, why not get your fix at a local kawfee-seller like Farley's on Potrero Hill instead?) - but what about all those other parties out there for you freedom-lovin' America-for-Americans? Tonight it's time to celebrate (and toast the outgoing, seemingly never-ending campaign cycle). Say "s'long" to those perpetually looping, loopy infomercials... here, there, everywhere:

PARTY LIKE AN ART STAR
Free pizza when the polls close! And an opportunity to write on the walls, think historical thoughts, and live it up at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. YBCA put a call out to makers to help them dream up a got-out-the-vote getdown. And boy did they respond: participants include Hella Hella Acapella with Lara Maykovich, Maya Dorm, Nichole Rodriguez, Marissa Greene and Madeleina Bolduc; Sri Satya Ritual Movement with Micah Allison, Isis, Indriya and Nikilah Badua; Anahata Sound; Derick Ion and the Satya Yuga Collective; Dancing the Dead Dharma (Sara Shelton Mann and Dance Brigade); Alleluia Panis and Dwayne Calizo; Anna Halprin; DJ Wey South; DJ Aztec Parrot with YBCA Young Artists at Work; rigzen; Maji; Sara Shelton Mann; Dance Brigade; Bruce Ghent; Rajendra Serber; Sonya Smith; Kira Maria Kirsch; Folawole Oyinlola; Lena Gatchalian; Sarah Bush; Hana Erdman; Karen Elliot; Richelle Donigan; Kimberly Valmore; Krissy Keefer, and Guardna contributor D. Scot Miller. Whew. Pass the Joe Six-Pack. 6–11 p.m., free with cash bar. YBCA, 701 Mission, SF.

CHICK-CHICK-CHICK THAT BOX
For finger-licking good times after licking the GOP? Free chicken if Obama wins from 9-10 p.m. at Farmer Brown, 25 Mason, SF. (415) 409-FARM.

SAN FRANCISCO'S OBAMA VICTORY PARTY
Oh, why not just call it now. Drink specials, guest speakers, and live election coverage. First 100 attendees get a free Shephard Fairy "Hope" poster. Doors 6 p.m., free. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. (415) 625-8880.

DON'T DODGE THE DRAFTS
Drafts - that's our cue to drink up! The Guardian bash boasts a free beer special (while it lasts) when you present a voter receipt or sticker. Win prizes like Beach Blanket Babylon tickets at an election trivia challenge. 7-9 p.m., free. Kilowatt, 3160 16th St., SF. (415) 861-2595.

By Mara Math

No one was more surprised than I that Stranded: I've Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains proved to be one of my favorite films at this year's San Francisco International Film Festival (it opens theatrically Fri/7). Like everyone else on the planet, I knew the notorious story, subject of Piers Paul Read's 1975 mass-market book Alive, the 1993 Hollywood movie of the same title that followed, and the pop culture residue: the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes in 1972 survived their arduous ten weeks by way of reluctant cannibalism. Stranded, a thoughtful and meditative documentary by Gonzalo Arijon, which mixes interviews with silent, nearly poetic reenactments, is the anti-sensationalist antidote to the Hollywood version. Formally, the film took four years to make, but a truer reckoning would be 34 years. Arijon grew up with the young team members and had been thinking of this film ever since the event. His lifelong friendships gave him unprecedented access, not only to archived materials but to the hearts and souls of the survivors and their families.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: One source called your films "unabashedly partisan." Would you say that's accurate?

Gonzalo Arijon: I agree with this description. It's true that my most of my films are about social and political issues. And this is like an exception to some people. A lot of friends and [colleagues] don't understand really why I put so much energy and time in this subject -- they don't understand the political issue of this subject.

By Molly Freedenberg

Thanks to the results of the presidential election, it seemed everyone I saw Tuesday night was happy and drunk. (Perhaps it also had something to do with drowning out the memory of the sad fates of Props H and 8.) And not surprisingly, many were reeling from cocktails they'd invented or renamed just for election night. My favorites? The Baracktail, a mixture of champagne and a fruity liquer, which was later rechristined The Landslide; and the Obama Bomb, a combo of Bacardi O and Red Bull.

What intoxicated you on November 4 (other than hope and triumph)? Let us know in the comments. Drink names are great, recipes are even better. And if you know of a bar who's keeping one on the menu, or running election-themed drink specials, we're interested in that too.

Ed Note -- OK, OK, we're a tad late posting these wonderful pics by Ariel Soto of the annual Day of the Dead procession -- at which we actually sensed a greater Latino presence than at years previous. But we got a little caught up in the whole election kerfuffle. Enjoy.

The group of skeletons that congregated at 24th and Bryant on the night of November 2nd, seemed excited and ready to embark on the procession lit by candles and redolent of incense, to honor friends and family who have passed on, perhaps to bigger and better places. The procession, accompanied by drummers and dancers, made its way through the Mission, ending in Garfield Park where spectators respectfully looked at dozens of altars constructed by different artists and family members.

OK, so I know we're way past the stage -- mostly -- where you can tell that someone's rollin' in the lavender fagioli by their look. And I realize the whole "Christian Rock movement" has weirdly co-opted such previously "alternative" gestures as the Van Gogh Dyke crumb-catcher and Vans footwear. Thank you, Jars of Clay. But I was perusing the photos that came out of "The Call" -- this horrifying mass rally of Prop 8 supporters that actually happened at San Diego's QualComm stadium a couple weeks ago (click here for Rex Wockner's great coverage) -- and I couldn't help thinking some things about edgy mall fashion, off-the-rack neo-christianist youth, and how a LOT of the people there must personally be familiar with "the anguish of the closet," or, in French, le poisson en les culottes.

First, here's the Logistics Coordinator:

Dude, you're wearing a WHAM! shirt. Unironically.

And here's the IT guy:

Does cream come with that twink?

And looking over the pretty awesome photos that Andres Duque took of the event to go with Wockner's coverage, I zoomed in on a few semi-shocking characters. ....

Hipster Runoff: ur doin it rong

Fabulous SFBG photog Ariel Soto hits the streets again, scoping out the latest in San Francisco daywear.

Aideen, Fillmore and Bush

Catherine, Castro and 19th Street

Kim, Market and Stockton

Nico, Fulton and Masonic

Trailer for Sita Sings the Blues, which opens the San Francisco International Animation Festival on Thu/13

At last the third annual San Francisco International Animation Festival is upon us -- and this year seems to be the best yet, what with the recent explosion of seriously entertaining animated feature films. Gone, mostly, are the slightly entertaining but also slightly masturbatory jaunts through the latest software capabilities. Gone, mostly, too are low-fi mumblecore-like doodles that half-heartedly combine anti-narrative blahs with dime-store angst. (Although one short, "Fantaisie in Bubblewrap" -- with the voice of Scarlett Johanson of all people -- could be said to be the epitome of such: individual pop-bubbles casually yet disturbingly bemoan their fate as one by one they're eviscerated by a shapened pencil.) That little piece of ennui/terror is included in the "Control Freaks" program of shorts, and is nicely balanced out by Australian Dennis Tupicoff's "Chainsaw" -- a 24-minute violently sexual hoot that rotoscopes a poetic descent into love and madness in the bush. Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner are implicated.

Huge on the hipster list will be Friday night's "Play it by Eye" program, which showcases a delightful menu of indie rock and dance videos that utilize animation. Tunes by Chemical Brothers, Gnarls Barkley, Chromeo, and Hot Chip all make appearances, as well as this little gem

Grizzly Bear, "Knife"

In this squinty YouTube world of ours, it's a rare chance to see these melodic whoppers fill the big screen. The above vid was directed/conceived by former Bay Area-based geniuses Encyclopedia Pictura, who get an entire documentary on Saturday afternoon. Here the EP studio is making their breakout vid for Bjork's "Wanderlust":

But a couple of the features are really what turned me on.

By Kevin Langson

The sixth annual 3rd I: San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival runs through Sun/16. Visit the fest's web site for additional information.

With The Glow of White Women, Yunus Valley forcefully and riotously reverses the colonial gaze to comedically consider the erotic imagery of -- and actual -- white women who have comprised his masturbatory fantasies and his libidinous relationships. Valley, a mixed-race Indian and black artist from South Africa, is an incendiary, unabashed director-subject who races through a confrontation of the sexual racism that made for tense relations and torrid desire during apartheid. With a devious grin and a subversive sense of humor encapsulated in his assertion that apartheid really wasn’t so oppressive because it meant that the black boys could sit at the back of the movie houses and masturbate to the images of white women on the screen, he plays at untangling his voracious appetite and contempt for Caucasian women -- as a personal and a cultural phenomenon. Don’t expect conclusions or for every element of this film to be well-realized or logically arranged, but do expect an unusually entertaining social critique. This film exudes the personality of its maker, which is to say it is hyper and playful, with a tinge of artist arrogance. Just as he is perfectly comfortable espousing that women are frivolous and not worth living with/committing to, he seems self-satisfied in the structuring of the film, feeling no need to contextualize or conclude as convention would dictate. And why not, if at the end one has the sense that he is a competent commentator, agitator, and entertainer? In two regards he brings to mind Michael Moore. He is a strong, confrontational personality that will likely earn avid detractors and avid supporters among his audience, and he conjures Roger and Me (1989) with his laughable but rather pointless ambush of a beauty queen. On the flipside, it is a beauty queen (the Miss South Africa pageant is a recurring theme) who provides the most chilling moment of the film, as well. When interviewed about her family’s relationship to the African workers who constitute the labor force of the family business, Miss South Africa is a shocking embodiment of the sort of paternalistic racism that is utterly ignorant of itself.

SFBG's Louis Peitzman interviews Trainspotting and 28 Days Later director Danny Boyle on the eve of the release of his latest flick, Slumdog Millionaire

L-R: Dev Patel and Anil Kapoor. Photo by Ishika Mohan

San Francisco Bay Guardian: Slumdog Millionaire is a very colorful and vibrant film. Obviously much of that has to do with the art direction and cinematography, but what was your role, as a director, in creating that look?

Danny Boyle: It was all linked to the central approach of this, which is, we didn't try — because you can't, is the real reason — to control it or recreate bits of it or change it. You've got two approaches as far as I can see. You either stand back and look at it sort of pictorially, which I didn't really want to do. We did some tests like that and that is an approach, and you can see that, especially in photography about India. It is extraordinary to look at sometimes. But I didn't really want to do that. I just wanted to dive in there and I thought that by the time the story's over, you'll have got that pictorial sense of it. You'll have accumulated it rather than actually be introduced to it bit by bit. So that was the idea, that we would film on the streets, use live sync sound as much as we could, and actually not change things, not redesign things, and if they did change, which they did — they'd change in front of your eyes, literally — we'd go with that change. So there wouldn't be any obsession with continuity, like there is normally on films. And we just accepted the fact — if you see it again, you'll notice there are lots of people looking at the camera, and there's guys saying, "No filming here" to the camera, things like that, which are all left in. And you just go with that as an approach, and you benefit from it. It drives you mad in one sense, in the controlled, precise think, but in the other way, you get life. You get a sense of it, or I hope you do. You get a bit of the flavor of what Mumbai is like as this electric city. So that was the idea; that was the approach.

SFBG: Going back to what you said about people looking into the camera and other moments like that, it feels like the movie goes back and forth between fantasy and realism. It's almost a fairy tale but with elements of real life. Was that something you were going for?

DB: It's just India, that. Their movies are fantastical, kind of like ridiculous things, and the life on the street is brutal in one sense, and yet the two sit together. That's the whole point. It's why they sit together really. So you're infected by that. It's so melodramatic, the story, in one sense. It's two brothers, of course — a good brother and a bad brother, and that is absolutely key to Indian cinema. That idea of good brother and bad brother. And they usually lose sight of their mother — their mother is kidnapped or lost — and then they find their mother again at the end when they're reconciled. But the bad boy has to die. And then there's always this thing about eternal love, which is also key to cinema there, which is this everlasting love that's pure and will overcome all obstacles. So those are the kind of things that you kind of get infected by. It's a bit like coming to America and you make a crime film, because crime and the way the country's been built, crime has been so linked to the way the country's been built, so inevitably, there is a reason why there's so much crime in American movies, why it's so key to American movies, because it's a part of the culture.

Director Danny Boyle. Photo by Ishika Mohan

So you end up, as a foreigner coming here, your film would be partly about crime inevitably. There are certain things that you just accumulate from the place, and you can't resist or avoid. And Simon [Beaufoy] got that in the writing; he got that partly from the book, but also from his own experiences, 'cause he toured India 20 years ago and he'd always wanted to write about it and never been able to find a key way in. He'd always wanted to write about it, and like me, he'd never wanted to do a Westerner in India. And I would never do a film like that. I don't want to watch Western guys wandering around India or anything like that. I sort of made a film like that, The Beach (2000), and I found it a very unsatisfying way of dipping into a country and just taking from a country for your own purposes. I much prefer to go there and try to submerge myself and the story in the place, and then come out of it. There are problems because studios say, "Well, there's no white guys in it, there are no recognizable names," but that's the way things are gonna go. Fortunately, I think that more of the world is opening up. We're gonna hopefully share more in a way. I think that's the way it's going.

By Louis Peitzman

Question: How do you stop a mob of unruly tweens?

Answer: You don't.

On the morning of Nov 10, 3,000 Twilight fans tried to rush their way into the Stonestown Galleria, all for a chance to meet Robert Pattinson. In the ensuing chaos, several young'uns got trampled, one girl allegedly broke her nose, and almost everyone was turned away. (I'm guessing that last bit hurt the most of all.)

For the uninitiated, Pattinson stars as vampire heartthrob Edward in the film adaptation (out Nov 21) of Stephenie Meyer's ludicrously popular book series. The actor's previous credits include a (spoiler alert!) tragic turn as Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), but his OMFG-level success seems to have popped up overnight.

"Hey, is that the Lost Boys soundtrack?": Robert Pattinson with Twilight co-star Kristen Stewart. (Photo credit: Peter Sorel)

When I met Pattinson in San Francisco later that same Monday, the mood was substantially more subdued.

Text and photos by Ariel Soto

It's quite inspiring to spend the morning walking through what seems like miles and miles of booths, all dedicated to sustainability, green living, and creating a better future for our beautiful planet. The San Francisco Green Festival, which took place this past weekend, is a perfect opportunity for novice greenies to learn about eco-investment companies, sample fair trade chocolate, learn about natural menstrual pads, dance to some local bands and to try on clothing dyed with everything from beets to onion skins. The event is held every year at the Concourse Exhibition Center and also travels throughout the country, so if you missed its stop in San Francisco, there's always a chance to catch it later in some other greening city.

SFBG's Justin Juul continues his fashionable Meet Your Neighbors series with an somewhat-organic boutique makeover

Carrots is one of those fancy boutiques you pass on your way to work and think Jesus, who the hell can afford this stuff? At least, that’s what I was thinking as I peered into the store’s window and saw a mannequin wearing a wool sweater and a button-up shirt with a $280 price tag. Beyond that was a palace filled with bearskin rugs, rusted machinery, and high-end apparel. On a normal shopping day I would have scoffed and taken my business elsewhere. But today was not a normal day. I had been sent to Carrots by the editor of a culture-and-nightlife magazine to check out the boutique’s new promotion: styling appointments for men who love beer. That’s how I met the first heiresses I will probably ever know, the proud owners of Carrots, Catie and Melissa Grimm of Grimmway Farms. They bought me beer, dressed me up in some swanky stuff, and even consented to this no-holds-barred interview about what its like to run a fashion emporium and live on karat juice.

Ooh la la!

SFBG: How did you guys get into the fashion thing?
Melissa Grimm: We’re sisters and when we were growing up we always talked about owning a business together. When we moved here three years ago we just fell in love with the city, but after about six months we realized that something like this was missing; you know, a store that combines men’s and women’s fashion. We wanted to create an environment you could just walk into and not feel intimidated, just a really comfortable space with a nice selection of hard to find things. We have handmade belts from Geoffrey Young, for example. Almost no one else has those.

SFBG: Yeah, you have a lot of stuff I’ve never seen, that’s for sure. Cool stuff. Did you go to fashion or design school or anything?
Melissa: No, but we know a lot about fashion and we try to pride ourselves on things that are hard to find. It comes from living a life of travel, growing up with a mother who’s very elegant and stylish. She sort of instilled that in both of us.

The sisters, anything but Grimm

SFBG: Yeah, my dad was a Marine so…

Catie Grimm: Um, yeah. Also, we both love to travel. It’s our favorite thing to do. And we love fashion. So we try to incorporate those two passions in everything we do.

SFBG: So you carry designers from all over the world then?

By Marke B.

This week, as part of our Milk Issue, dedicated to the political memory of Harvey Milk, I take a look at some of the ways Harvey has been transformed into an icon of queer martyrdom -- for good or ill. I cheekily reference the extremely moving 2004 "Saint Harvey: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Gay Martyr" show at the GLBT Historical Society, which will also open a temporary exhibit about Harvey on the Castro beginning November 26, in conjunction with the nationwide release of the Milk movie.

From "Saint Harvey: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Gay Martyr."

I also talk about influential young photographer Leo Herrera from queer collective Homochic's appropriation of the suit that Harvey was shot in. He displayed his impressionistic shots of that precious relic in his 2007 "San Francisco: Sex & Icons" show at Magnet in the Castro, and also assembled them in a short film titled My Name is Harvey Milk, whose soundtrack is Harvey's recording of his own will right before he was murdered. I asked him to share some of his thoughts via email from his temporary base in NYC about his show, about Harvey as icon, and also Harvey's "martyrdom" status.

Harvey suit image (and all images below) by Leo Herrera

Leo Hererra: Basically I went to the Martyr exhbit at the GLBT Historical Society in '04 and saw the suit for the first time with my brother Allan and my mother. I was completely floored not only by the way the suit was exhibited but also by the humble surroundings of the Historical Society itself. I approached them and told them that I wanted to work with them in any capacity that they needed, and they let me know that they could use a lot of help, especially from people my age. I told them I wanted to do a series of images based on gay culture and they arranged for me to shoot whatever I wanted.

Allan and I arrived and shot a lot of the relics that they have there, and I finally got the balls to ask them to shoot the suit.*

Soooo, imagine Allan and I opening up the box and there it was. The whole thing is really scary because the box had all of what he was wearing the night of his assassination, including his socks and tie. I shot some images but they weren't coming out right, and our hands were shaking the whole time. Finally I told Allan that if we were going to do this right, we better not be afraid to touch it and we finally picked it up. And flakes of gore came off of it because it's so bloody and gory and they fell on our arms and it went downhill from there, but I remember feeling this really intense creativity and really the spirit of gay culture in many ways.

We laid the suit on top of a light box and the bullet holes from the shots that went through his back shone through, we also put a lamp behind where his heard would be, and did all sorts of arty shit. The funny part was, I really didn't relate to the images as I shot them and didn't understand them because I was using a very different aesthetic. I put the images away for a couple of years and when I pulled them out, I realized that the aesthetic of the images was really something more sophisticated than I was used to at the time and that it really matched what I was working with now, they were somehow more mature. So in a way, I had shot the images to be used four years after the fact.

It was all real arty hipster shit.

Style intern Chloe Schildhause talks trends and togs. Check out her most recent installment here.

Diane Keaton’s style in Woody Allen’s Manhattan is beyond inspiring. Her tailored blazers, high-waisted wide leg dress pants and her insistence on not wearing a bra are fashion philosophies worth living by.

By Brandon Bussolini

Neon colors and animal themes are on a short list of art/design memes just past their prime, waiting for eager replacements. Randy Colosky’s new show at Adobe Books, “The Circus (in My Mind) Is in Town,” trades heavily on both of these tropes: lean rectangles of dayglo construction paper form the backdrop, and occasionally weave in and out of collaged Hubble telescope photos, a smudged stampede of grizzlies, and an artfully draped, scratchily rendered snake.

In other pieces, pagodas poke out of tiny, puffy clouds like soft teeth, or those same clouds drop down golden entrails like a skyborne Portuguese Man o’ War. There’s a seriality at work across these images that doesn’t attempt to amount to a narrative, however elliptical. Instead, there’s a building up and stripping down of materials - the busiest pieces and the most spare, such as Post Tool Similization 2, meet up in a kind of post-human serenity.

Although sublimated, Fort Thunder - the Providence, RI, warehouse space that gave birth to Lightning Bolt, Mindflayer, Forcefield, and their eye-poppingly busy, extensively neon brand of art - is one of Colosky’s inspirations here, along with Chinese scroll painting. (Colosky maintained scene continuity by inviting former Providence resident and current SF dweller John Dwyer’s Oh Sees to play the opening tonight, Wed/19.)

Style intern Chloe Schildhause talks trends and togs. Check out her latest installment here.

“We see fashion as art. We get a lot of crap from our friends, but for me I want to get away from that stereotype of the superficial, pretentious, vanity idea of fashion and use [fashion] for a good cause.” – Kari Koller

Designer Lula Chapman sheds media ideals.

Some may argue that fashion is frivolous, superficial, and designed to make normal women feel bad about themselves. But I disagree. Done right, fashion encourages creativity and self-esteem. Even better? It changes the world.

Style intern Chloe Schildhause talks trends and togs. Check out her latest installment here.

It’s been over a month since Obama-lovers and fashionistas gathered for “Fashioning Change: Barack Obama Fashion Show Fundraiser,” so it seems silly to talk about the event itself – especially since Obama won.

But it’s certainly not too late to highlight the diverse fashion designers who got involved with the cause. Here are some favorites, including some impeccably tailored, innovative, and classy looks.

Intrepid reporter Justin Juul continues his Meet Your Neighbors series, interviewing the Bay Area folks you'd like to know most.

There’s this weird thing that happens in your brain when you’re about to turn 30. All of a sudden you begin to sense that the best part of your life is ending and that you’d better figure shit out quickly before the rest of your life starts to suck. The possibility that you might die, broke and alone, becomes more of a reality and you begin to obsess about “getting your life on track.” Most people go through a series of dramatic lifestyle changes at this point. They get “real jobs,” stop drinking whiskey every night, cut their hair short, and start dressing a like a mannequin from the Gap or whatever. They stop caring about parties and music and art, and they become infatuated with stability. These are the people you see in early evening sitcoms and on cereal commercials -- happy Americans with smiling children, mini vans, and tract homes. But then there are people like Merkley, people who decided, somewhere around 30, that they didn’t want any of that shit.

Merkley is a photographer/artist who lives near the Haight district in a giant street-level apartment in a building that he also owns. That means he doesn’t pay rent and that he’s free do whatever the hell he wants all the time. His daily activities vary from month to month, but they almost always include taking pictures of naked women, drinking liquor, listening to DEVO, and thinking about his idol, Flavor Flav. When he’s not busy with that, he’s hanging out with his dogs, Snortzle and Butterface, or painting super-intricate pictures of old men in suits playing accordions on donkeys and shit like that.

Merkley is who I want to be when I grow up (minus the hippie hair). You can buy his limited-edition coffee table book, 111 ??? [SF Women You Know, at Home on the Sofa in their Favorite Shoes], here.

SFBG: Merkley, where are you going? I thought we were gonna do this interview.

Merkley: Yes! Wow, you’re right on time, aren’t you? I was just heading to the liquor store for some chocolate milk, but fuck it. I already have plenty. Come on in.

SFBG: Cool. Why do you need so much chocolate milk?
Merkley: Oh. It’s for this drink. I invented it. It’s called Chocolate Milk and Vodka. Want some?

SFBG: Well, it’s 1:00 in the afternoon, and I gotta drive soon, so I think I better stick to three beers for now. Don’t let me drink more than that.
Merkley: Sounds good to me. So what do you wanna know?

SFBG: First, how do you get all these girls to take their clothes off for you? Are they just hard-up porno chicks from Craigslist or something?

Intrepid reporter Justin Juul hits the streets each week for our Meet Your Neighbors series, interviewing the Bay Area folks you'd like to know most.

Remember that anti-drug commercial from the mid-eighties where the college kid is running in slow-motion as dark, ominous music plays in the background? “When I grow up, I want to be a track star,” says an invisible toddler. Then the scene starts to change. The camera zooms out to show that the kid isn’t running toward victory at the finish line like it seemed; he’s running from a cop. At this point, a deep and serious voice says “Nobody ever says, ‘I want to be a junkie when I grow up.’” The message is obvious: kids don’t choose to do drugs; they just fall into it because nobody ever told them that jogging is better. That’s the kind of thing porn stars have to deal with all the time: not the cop-chase stuff, but the idea that whoever participates in “deviant” behavior must be the victim of bad parenting or psychological malfunctioning. These commercials suggest that to shun societal norms is to doom yourself to a life of addiction and incarceration. But that’s not always the case.

I mean, my grandmother has been smoking weed for thirty years and she’s healthy and kind-hearted and free. In fact, I know lots of people who sell, do, and talk about drugs on a daily basis, and you know what? They’re awesome too. Some of them have good jobs, kids, nice houses -- all that shit. Well, it’s the same with porn stars.

By Molly Freedenberg

To take a page from Dani Leone's book, I have a new favorite restaurant. It's Gitane, opened by the same people who brought us Cafe Claude, and it's fantastic. Of course, I might be a bit biased. The name "Gitane" means "gypsy woman," and indeed, the restaurant's interior and menu was designed with gypsy culture in mind. Having been told my whole life that I'm descended from gypsies and horse thieves (on Mom's side, from the Slavias), I felt a kinship with this place before I'd set foot inside the deceptively small building. Plus, in a town brimming with neuvo Californian, Asian fusion, Pan-American, and upscale Southern cuisines, there was simply something refreshing about someone doing something I'd never heard of before.