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San Francisco is fantastically beautiful, charismatic, smart, and compelling; also insane, abusive, and cruel. Visiting SF is like visiting a psycho ex. I lived and loved there 1991-2002, and my feelings will forever be mixed.

Continue to lots more photos and captions

This was back in June, but the award arrived today, only slightly damaged by its long journey from Porto Alegre, Brazil (I think it adds character). Thanks, Fantaspoa!

Seder-Masochism will screen at the Castro, one of my favorite movie theaters in the whole world, this Sunday July 21 at 11:30am, as part of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. I will be there too!

Here’s a really sweet review of Seder-Masochism in the Jewish News of Northern California. (The whole time I lived in San Francisco, I never used my Jew Card. I didn’t even make a Jew Card until I started Seder-Masochism, a decade after I left the Bay Area. Better late than never.)

I just bought plane tickets an hour ago, partly because the weather forecast for Urbana IL predicts highs of 96°F Thursday onwards, while San Francisco’s predicted highs are 30° lower all week. I wasn’t planning to travel this month, since I just got back from Moscow and want to ride my recumbent bicycles as much as I can. But when it’s 96° and humid, I’m not gonna bike anyway.

This trip will also be my last chance to visit the fabled Pentshack, my home in the early 1990’s. My pal Mitch Altman, who has lived there since I sublet it it to him in 1995, is leaving for good, as the house beneath it is being sold. Here’s a picture of the Pentshack interior, with me in it, from those long-ago days:

It’s just up the street from the Castro Theater! Where maybe I’ll see you this coming Sunday July 21 at 11:30am! Seder-Masochism also plays at the Piedmont Theater Saturday, August 3rd, at 8:45pm, but I’ll be back in Illinois by then, biking through the heat and humidity.

Continue reading “Moscow Travelblogue”

I’m heading to Russia in a few days for the Moscow Jewish Film Festival, for two screenings of my latest feature film, Седер-Мазохизм.

It’s been 3 decades since my single semester of adult-education introductory Russian, but I did find a handy Cyrillic-to-phonetic-English alphabet chart online:

At least I can try pronouncing a word or two. I’m privileged to practice on this:

I suck at caricatures, but when Graham Linehan (Glinner on Twitter) asked me to draw him a new avatar, I did my best. Graham is a true ally to feminists, and although my depiction is hyperbolic, it’s also sincere.

I limit my social media use to 15 minutes total daily, so I seldom post on twitter or fecebook. I’d reconsider if they stopped banning people, especially people I most want to hear from, especially women. Graham himself wrote a nice Medium article in May on why he was leaving Twitter — then Medium banned him. Twitter hasn’t banned him yet, so he’s back there, fighting the good fight, metaphorical sword of righteousness aflame.