Question: What’s more frustrating than a puzzle that seems impossible to solve? Answer: A puzzle that is impossible to solve.
That’s how I felt while exiting the San Francisco Playhouse after the Opening Night performance of The Nether, a controversial recent play by Los Angeles-based Jennifer Haley. Playhouse artistic director Bill English (who also staged the current version) brought this curious sci-fi drama here after productions in London and New York were warmly received. It’s easy to see what generated the enthusiasm. Haley’s topic is the threat that evolving technology—in this case, the ability to provide virtual reality (VR) experiences through the Internet—may pose for our species, and she has wrapped the issue inside a suspenseful, at times shocking scenario that includes homosexuality, pedophilia, criminal violence, mental illness and Big Brother-type police overreach. If that isn’t enough to arouse public interest, I don’t know what is.
The San Francisco Playhouse has earned a reputation for high production values and The Nether doesn’t disappoint. To cope with the challenge of a non-linear storyline that requires rapid shifts among four diverse locations (a drab police interrogation room, the Edwardian-style salon where most of the VR action takes place, a bucolic country meadow and a child’s bedroom), designer Nina Ball utilizes an exceptionally effective revolving stage. (These things can be creaky and unreliable, but not this one.) Michael Desch supplies appropriate lighting, although scenes in the claustrophobic interrogation room might have benefited from more contrast shadow. Brooke Jennings’ costumes are spot on, especially the period clothes worn in the turn-of-the-century VR “Hideaway.”
Also in keeping with Playhouse tradition, the acting ensemble is first-rate. Warren David Keith is Sims and Louis Parnell is Doyle, both respectable middle-aged gentleman whose activity on the Internet (called the “nether” in this futuristic setting) has attracted the authorities’ attention. Without being charged with a crime, they’re summoned to police headquarters, where a female Detective Morris (Ruibo Qian) asks them to explain their frequent VR visits to the Hideaway and, in Sims’ case, his interest in underage girls. Successive scenes explore these issues, and in the process, we learn about the dark impulses that lie just beneath the surface of Sims’ and Doyle’s placid exteriors. In addition, we are informed that, as part of their investigation, the police are able to infiltrate an agent named Woodnut (Josh Schell), disguised as a client, into the Hideaway to gather evidence about Sims’ sexual relations with Iris (Matilda Holtz, alternating with Carmen Steele), the pre-teen resident prostitute.
Despite the production’s virtues, I found myself growing increasingly perplexed as The Nether moved through its 80-minute, no-intermission running time. There were so many inexplicable aspects to the story’s central conceit: That the Internet could serve as a portal for individuals to enter a world of virtual reality whenever they wanted, to do whatever they wanted and to be joined there by strangers (including undercover agents) who just popped in on their own volition without being invited by the person who initiated the VR experience.
Aside from technical reservations, it’s hard to know what Haley is trying to say. She seems to be worried about a lot of things, among them growing police surveillance, the adverse effects of repressed sexual drive, societal restrictions on personal behavior and the need to have alternative outlets for free expression—to name a few. All are a part of the unsolvable puzzle that I mentioned at the outset. A glance at New York and London reviews (yes, I used the Internet) reveals that critics in those cities, though complimentary, were similarly confounded. Perhaps we should all just relax and acknowledge that—whether we understand it or not—Haley has written a gripping play that will inspire discussions like this long after it has departed the scene. End of story.
NOW PLAYING The Nether runs through March 5 at the San Francisco Playhouse; 450 Post St., San Francisco; 415/677-9596; sfplayhouse.org.
You may recall hearing about the light brown apple moth back in 2007. That was when a California Department of Food and Agriculture program began aerially spraying populated areas of Monterey and Santa Cruz counties. This resulted in hundreds of complaints of harm to human health and wildlife. The next step in the plan was to spray pesticides over multiple counties in the Bay Area every 30 to 90 days for seven years.
Two thoughts may have come to mind:
1) They’re spraying pesticides from airplanes over people, farms and coastal waterways?
2) How did this loser, lackluster moth with no exceptional skills or looks, get the starring role in the drama?
Last month, after years of fighting the spray here in the Bay Area, an appeals court finally threw out the State of California’s Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM) pesticide program on the grounds that it violates state environmental laws.
“This case is about looking before you leap,” said Earthjustice attorney Greg Loarie, who assisted with the case. “The Department of Food and Agriculture tried to impose this spraying program on the public without real environmental review, and the court has rightly called foul.”
The Third District Court of Appeal’s ruling hinged on the state’s last-minute shift in the program’s goal from “eradication” to ongoing “control” of the apple moth. The Department of Food and Agriculture made this major change when approving the program, but without analyzing the health and environmental impacts of an indefinite control program and without reconsidering less toxic control strategies that the agency had dismissed on the grounds that those strategies would not “eradicate” the moth.
The department also failed to study feasible alternatives to its pesticide-based strategy. The court concluded that the state’s analysis “was fatally defective in failing to study a range of reasonable alternatives.” The apple moth program has cost $6 million in federal funds alone during the past two years and targets an insect that to date has done no documented damage to crops or wild plants in California.
Just who is this mystery moth? The Light Brown Apple Moth (Epiphyas postvittana) is a moth native to Australia that moseyed over to New Zealand and Hawaii more than 100 years ago. When Roy Upton’s team at Citizens for Health, a scientifically-based public health and environmental organization, contacted horticultural experts in Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and the UK, where the moth is widespread, the response was unanimous: Why are you asking us about such an insignificant insect? Quit bugging us.
In fact, in 2008, when I contacted James Carey, professor and former vice chair of the Department of Entomology at the University of California at Davis, he responded with this:
“The Light Brown Apple Moth should not be on a ‘Class A’ list. This is not a serious pest. And even if it was a more serious pest, there is zero chance to eradicate it. Not a small chance or miniscule chance but basically zero. Eradication is not possible because you’re not eradicating an LBAM population but you’re trying to eradicate 100,000 LBAM populations. There are millions of pockets of these and each pocket has a separate population. Every little metastasis can regenerate the population.”
Reputable scientists in New Zealand and here in California, who are not associated with or financially compensated in any way by USDA/CDFA say that the moth at its worst has a small potential to be a crop-quality issue. A more integrated pest management plan is recommended by them: Careful monitoring, attracting many natural occurring predators (wasps, spiders, birds etc.,) and a well-timed, target specific, naturally-based insecticide when necessary.
Who do we Marinites owe thanks to for stopping our ’hoods from being sprayed with pesticides every few months for seven years? The lawsuit was brought by Our Children’s Earth Foundation; the Cities of Albany, Berkeley and Richmond; Mothers of Marin Against the Spray; Stop the Spray East Bay; Center for Environmental Health; Pesticide Action Network North America; Citizens for East Shore Parks; Californians for Pesticide Reform; Pesticide Watch; and Stop the Spray San Francisco, represented by the law firm Cooley LLP, Earthjustice and by the City and County of San Francisco represented by the City Attorney.
“This is a victory for all who became ill after the first round of apple moth spraying,” says Debbie Friedman, lawyer and founder of Moms Advocating Sustainability (formerly Mothers of Marin Against the Spray).“Although the court’s decision cannot restore the health of the 11-month-old who nearly died from respiratory arrest after the aerial spray, this ruling clearly signals to the state that the risks of these kinds of programs must be disclosed before the chemicals rain down, not after.”
Seven years ago I was happily writing about blue hydrangeas and English rose varieties when Marin’s fearless Debbie Friedman contacted me at the Pacific Sun and asked me to meet her. She arrived with a briefcase full of scientific studies. She forced me to wake up and smell the pesticides. If a diva can leave her shallow past behind, you can, too! Learn more about the important work that she and her team do here: Momsadvocatingsustainability.org.
“We congratulate the tireless, well-organized efforts of the individuals and groups whose actions led to a court decision supporting public health and sound science,” says Dr. Margaret Reeves, senior scientist at Pesticide Action Network. “Eradication of crop pests is almost never a realistic outcome; rather, ecological pest management or control is the safest and most viable approach to controlling pests and ensuring the success of farming in California.”
Speaking with Jerry Navas, the newly hired 23-year-old pastry chef at Taste Kitchen & Table in Fairfax, the phrase, “The world is his oyster,” comes to mind. After a trip to Europe where he fell in love with all things French pastry, Navas changed course from savory cooking to sweet, and now hopes to introduce Marinites to some of his Parisian favorites—just in time for Valentine’s Day.
Taste owners Rochelle Edwards and Lorenzo Jones brought Navas on board in November and already, the menu reflects the young chef’s attention to more advanced technique and classic offerings. But not to worry—favorites aren’t going away, and those pretty, tasteless French confections that we want to love (but don’t) are not what’s on the new menu at Taste. Instead, a flakey and more dense croissant is offered up, along with canelés—exquisite little caramelized bombs of goodness with a chewy exterior and a soft custard filling.
For the upcoming holiday, lovely pink, heart-shaped macarons flavored with pomegranate and rose enrobe luscious raspberries for a crunchy treat of fruity and not-too-sweet decadence. Chocolate-dipped strawberries, a delectable caramel confection and apple turnovers will also be gracing the shelves the week of February 14.
Navas, who trained at City College of San Francisco and cut his teeth at Chantal Guillon (a San Francisco retail store known for their macarons), is exuberant about his craft. “As soon as I touched pastry, I knew that is what I wanted to do,” gushes the animated chef, who cites fashion design, mixology and architecture as interests. “I’m always looking for new challenges.” Along with learning the ropes at Taste, he is also experimenting with different flours and developing what he hopes will be a perfect gluten-free croissant.
Clearly, Taste has plenty of changes afoot. An expanded wholesale operation is slated for the café, and if all goes to plan, baguettes and various savory breads will also be available, along with wedding cakes and additional French-focused offerings that include clafoutis, quiche Lorraine and even tarte tatin.
The barely 1 ½-year-old café has transitioned well from its previous incarnation as Fat Angel Bakery and has become a popular hangout for locals. Now with Navas at the ovens, I expect that all of the offerings will become more refined and focused. But don’t take my word for it—taste for yourself, or pick up something sweet for someone you love.
Sex trafficking has become a major focus of Bay Area law enforcement agencies in recent months. They’ve been especially fretful leading up to the Super Bowl at Santa Clara’s Levi’s Stadium this weekend.
The marquee event and human trafficking are connected by widespread predictions that hordes of cash-flush chauvinists will swarm into town for the costumed war play, then ravish tens of thousands of women and children—brought here against their will—to quell their surging testosterone.
The problem is it just isn’t true.
Maggie McNeill, an “unretired call girl” and nationally published writer, has been debunking this myth ever since its first rumblings at the 2004 Athens Olympics. At the 2006 World Cup in Germany, human rights organizations estimated that 40,000 prostitutes would flock to the event. By the time of the 2010 Super Bowl in Miami, the number had stayed the same, except that it was no longer voluntary prostitutes, but captive women and children.
“It morphed,” McNeill says. “It became a more and more interesting lie—because force, fraud and coercion are more interesting than voluntary prostitution. Voluntary prostitution, that’s old hat. It’s known. Nobody cares about that.”
The hysteria has led to short-term prevention efforts. During the 2012 Super Bowl, host city Indianapolis passed harsher sex laws, trained 3,400 people to recognize the signs of human trafficking and distributed 40,000 bars of soap branded with the trafficking hotline number to all area hotels. Authorities made 68 commercial sex arrests; two qualified as human-trafficking cases. During the 2015 Super Bowl, Phoenix law enforcement identified 71 adult prostitutes, arrested 27 sex solicitors and found nine underage sex workers who may or may not have been trafficked.
A soon-to-be-released Stanford case study of the last five Super Bowl cities confirms that there is no significant statistical basis for the claim that sex trafficking, or the demand for paid sex, increases around marquee sporting events.
The Super Bowl sex-trafficking sirens fly in the face of conventional prostitution economics. Most sex workers build a cache of reliable clients that provide most of their income through steady year-round visits. For the myth to be true, traffickers would have to travel from event to event, board their captives in hotels at inflated rates, advertise to attract dozens of new-in-town customers, then charge less than the local prostitutes to undercut the competition. All while law enforcement is on its most alert status.
“It’s just not a viable business model,” McNeill says. “From an economic standpoint, the whole trafficking myth is bogus. It doesn’t make sense.”
Plus the market is thin, McNeill says. Road-tripping bros blow their life savings to pack themselves 10 to a room. Many can’t afford paid sex, much less a private space for the deed. And other potential customers are often family men with the whole brood in tow.
“What are they going to say? ‘Oh, um, pardon me, Mabel, could you take the kids while I go to see a whore?’ It’s ridiculous,” McNeill says. “Trade shows, that’s where we make our money. There are expense accounts, so the company is taking care of their food and their lodging. They can take their own money and pay for girls.”
The Super Bowl sex rumor helped spawn a moral panic surrounding human trafficking that has become a cottage industry for local law enforcement agencies. In 2014, the California Legislature appropriated $5 million to begin developing “multi-disciplinary protocols” to combat human trafficking; following that, annual funding of $14 million will keep the programs going.
These anti-trafficking efforts respond to some truly shocking—though highly questionable—estimates of a worldwide epidemic: 14.2 million people in global labor trafficking, up to 300,000 U.S. children “vulnerable” to sexual exploitation.
Citing the disparity between spending and results, sex workers believe that they have become targets under the moral banner of trafficking-prevention to fund politically fashionable law enforcement activities at the expense of marginalized communities.
“Cha-ching—it’s money. It’s all about more money, more manpower,” McNeill says.
Still, champions of the crackdown cite the Bay Area as among America’s highest risk areas for human trafficking, especially labor trafficking, which is three times more prevalent than sex trafficking worldwide. Our region’s ethnic diversity and proximity to ports means that victims can be moved around without attracting suspicion, especially since most victims are smuggled in from other countries.
“What we’ve seen in the majority of those cases is that the victims know their traffickers—family members, a friend, neighbors—from their home country, and are brought here under the pretense that they’re going to have a job, make good money, and so on,” says Perla Flores of Community Solutions, a service provider to human-trafficking survivors in Santa Clara and San Benito counties. “But once they arrive, it’s a completely different situation. The smugglers keep their passport and put them into a situation where they’re being exploited for their labor and they don’t have the freedom to leave.”
Authorities are working to develop awareness strategies ahead of Super Bowl 50. Santa Clara County funded and published a 12-minute movie detailing red flags that might signal human trafficking, but the finished product reeks of amateurish iMovie editing and plods along far too slowly for the modern attention span. It has been viewed fewer than 900 times.
But measures like this are considered necessary because trafficking victims cannot identify themselves. In an effort to do something about this concealed crime, California shifted its focus to the sex trafficking of minors and passed Proposition 35 in November 2012. The law beefed up the penalties for sex trafficking, registered the convicted as sex offenders and funneled any funds received from raised fines into law enforcement and victim services. Prosecutors no longer had to prove force, fraud or coercion for survivors under 18, because they’re too young to consent to any form of sex.
Following this, anti-trafficking efforts jumped, but as anti-trafficking agencies patrol websites linked to prostitution, they sweep up voluntary prostitutes in their nets. In 2013 and 2014, the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office arrested five prostitutes total. In 2015, they arrested 31, a more than six-fold increase in half the time.
Sex worker Maxine Doogan fumes over the increased arrests brought on by anti-trafficking efforts. “A prostitution arrest is a pink slip,” she says. “It forces people to migrate to another area to find work. Any time you’re a worker in the underground economy and you come into a new area, you are at high risk for a violent act—rape, theft, sexual assault. That’s where you start to see the force; fraud and coercion start to happen. Because of the criminalization, you can easily have a volunteer situation and turn it into something that’s involuntary, and you don’t have any recourse, any access to equal protection under the law.”
Under California code, anyone who receives any money resulting from the labor of a sex worker can be considered a pimp, a felony charge punishable for up to six years in state prison.
“My son, who I was helping through school, would be qualified as a pimp,” says the pimp-free Doogan, who arranges meetings with clients online. “People that we are living with, and who are benefiting from our earnings, in that we contribute our fair share of rent, are pimps. Our landlord is a pimp. Our dry cleaner is a pimp. Everybody is a pimp.”
Decriminalizing sex work in the Bay Area is a ways off, considering that San Francisco, a mecca of open-mindedness, failed to pass a measure in 2008. “What decriminalization does is bring sex work out into the open,” says Jerald Mosley, a retired deputy attorney general for California who spoke at a recent hearing.
Sex workers could be brought into the anti-trafficking crusade. Instead, this ideological wall has alienated a potentially valuable ally.
“They don’t care about me. None of those people ever come to me,” Doogan says. “The prostitute nation is alive and well in the Bay Area. We’re very visible. And they don’t have the respect to call me up and say, ‘I want to save trafficking victims.’ Great. Go save trafficking victims. But you don’t need to do it on my back, and on the back of everyone in my community.”
When Sandy De Long contacted the Pacific Sun offices a few months ago in search of something that she had misplaced, it wasn’t a phone call, or an email or a text message that brought her closer to a copy of the piece of newsprint that had united her and her husband nearly 40 years earlier. It was an in-person inquiry. She had come from Mill Valley to describe the personal ad that a man named Russ had placed in the Classifieds section of the newspaper in 1975. There was the story of how she had seen the ad, the story of how she had replied to it and the story of how, the following year, she had married Russ.
We were intrigued by her words and her memories, and we wondered what it must have been like to meet someone that way, at a time when carefully chosen words to strangers could hold so much power and meaning. How romantic. And in today’s fast-paced world, how foreign. “Call me old fashioned,” she would later say.
The way that she talked about her relationship with her husband reminded me of the way that my grandfather would, after more than 60 years of marriage, still stare at my grandmother as though he were seeing her for the very first time. “Isn’t she something?” he’d ask.
After all of those years, Sandy De Long was looking for a tangible memento from that time—something to remind her of their correspondence.
“I think his ad started out, ‘Does the woman exist who … ’” Sandy recalls recently by phone. “I liked what he was looking for; I liked all of the detail.” She notes that she was just looking at the personals for fun and wasn’t intending to respond. But his ad, full of adjectives—intelligent, independent, sensitive—that described the kind of woman that he hoped to meet, caught her eye.
Sandy wrote Russ a letter on a Thursday, the day the ad appeared in the paper. He received her letter on Saturday, called her on Sunday and they set a date for Monday. Russ received 37 replies to that ad. She says that she replied in a “résumé style,” outlining her likes and dislikes, and providing her IQ score. She added at the end that she had “freckles, glasses and unkempt hair.”
Russ, sharing the land line with his wife, chimes in: “She added it like it was a bad thing, but I happened to love freckles, glasses and unkempt hair.”
Sandy called her mom in San Francisco and told her that she had replied to a man’s personal ad in the paper. “You did what?!” her mother shouted. “It could be an axe murderer!”
“And then this guy in his three-piece suit drives up in his Mercedes to take me out to dinner,” Sandy says with a laugh.
It was very clever, she admits, of Russ to put an ad in the paper, asking for replies by mail. “To have someone write to you rather than a phone call … because you can tell a lot about a person by their letter.”
Following the marriage of Sandy and Russ in October of 1976, the Sun ran an article titled, “Want Ad Romance,” about how the couple had met through the personals. “We’re working on our 40th year,” Sandy says proudly.
A treasure trove of microfilm—going back to the early ’60s—at the Mill Valley Library, revealed the article. It was a glimpse into the dating world of a bygone era—a time when a “Sincere healthy guy” desired the companionship of “an honest, attractive gal.” When a 17-year-old woman, who enjoyed “bike riding, guitar, swimming and real communication” expressed her need for “some moving, learning, open friends.” A time when a “rare woman” was being sought out—a woman who was strongly in need of “a special man who is intense about life, people, nature, justice, loving, sexuality, in short, a man who has a ‘lust for life.’
“If you are a ‘lady at tea,’ a ‘cook in the kitchen’ and a tiger overall—and turn on to the above—run don’t walk to the mail box [sic] with your letter …”
Illustration by Gina Contreras
At that time, the Sun, along with other Bay Area newspapers, ran a handful of personal ads (for which people would be charged by the word) every week in the Classifieds section. But in the late ’70s, and through the ’80s and ’90s, Sandy says, “It kind of exploded.” Before long, there were “pages and pages” of people “looking.”
“Women looking for men, men looking for women, men looking for men,” Sandy says. “Men looking for ducks … whatever it was, it was in there.”
Rosemary Olson, publisher of both the Bohemian and the Pacific Sun, recalls that heyday at the Bohemian. “I hosted ‘Romance Parties,’” she says, “helping most attendees write their ads, many wanting sunset romantic walks on the beach.”
Olson’s favorite party was at a million-dollar mansion overlooking Hamilton Field in Novato. “We had so many people attend,” she says, noting that most alternative weeklies had a designated ‘Personals Specialist’ who would handle walk-ins, read letters and hand-input the text for print. “The house was packed with happy Sonoma, Napa and Marin singles.”
Linda Xiques, managing editor of the Sun from 1982 to 2006, recalls that in the early days, the paper had a receptionist who was in charge of accepting the ads and advising people how to write them. “We used to say of one such receptionist,” Xiques says, “‘She’s skimming the cream.’ She seemed to show up with a new boyfriend every week or so. Later when the personal ads were really booming, we hired someone to take charge of the ad flow.”
“The revenue,” adds Steve McNamara, former owner, publisher and editor of the Sun (1966-2004), “came from the phone calls that people made on a 900 number to connect with the person who had placed the ad. At its peak, the weekly revenue was about $15,000, although that didn’t last.”
The Pacific Sun also hosted mixers, where people who placed personal ads in the paper could get in for free. “People had a chance to meet each other, even if they didn’t meet anyone,” says Mal Karman, a Pacific Sun contributor who is quick to relay humorous stories of corresponding with “a beauty of Romanian descent” and a “Goldie Hawn Lookalike.”
“You’d hear people on the street talking about the Sun’s wacky, often perverse personal ads,” says Pacific Sun Movie Page Editor Matt Stafford, who has been contributing to the paper for years. “In the ’70s the ads reflected that fun, free, groovy, pre-AIDS, pre-Reagan, pre-tech era when people would hook up with less fear and loathing than they do now. Then it became a happy habit that endured till the turn of the century.”
On April 21, 1995, Match.com—claiming to be “#1 in dates, relationships and marriages”—launched, throwing a wrench in the personal ad business, and opening up a gamut of new possibilities in the world of romance.
According to a Pew Research Center study from last year, in the mid-’90s, only 14 percent of American adults were Internet users. Today, nearly nine in 10 Americans are online, and online dating sites like OkCupid (free) and eHarmony (costly), along with apps like Tinder (where one can find users nearby) continue to grow in popularity. A 2013 Pew study found that attitudes toward online dating have also changed, with 59 percent of Americans agreeing with the statement, “Online dating is a good way to meet people”—compared to 44 percent in 2005.
“I think the personals dwindled in popularity around the same time the Internet came along and more or less doomed the newspaper business,” Stafford says. “This also, of course, coincided with a new proclivity for faceless social media.”
Judy Orsini, a 63-year-old retired campus planner who lives in Mill Valley, remembers using the Pacific Sun personals in 1998—around the time that online dating was gaining steam. She responded to an ad—“the longest and most informative”—by a man named Roy who described himself as “easy on the eyes.” He was looking for someone to bike, ski and travel with—all interests that she shared. After five years of living together, Judy and Roy married.
“I know that when he put the ad up, he had at least half a dozen dates before he met me,” Orsini says. “He told himself he was going to be a gentleman, not a jerk. He wanted to take the time to meet everyone, which I thought was kind of a sweet thing.”
Orsini says that the personal ad was the most efficient way to meet someone. “You know, when you’re working and busy all the time, and you want to meet people? I wasn’t into the bar scene. I’m not extremely outgoing, so it’s not that easy for me to meet someone on the street or in a store and strike up a conversation.”
She didn’t have many single friends at the time. “Not true today!” Most, she says, are looking for love on Match.com. And most of them have had very little luck.
“Everybody thought it was going to be the big solution to finding your mate for life,” Orsini says of online dating. “Of course what I hear all the time is that people lie.”
“Times have changed,” she says, wistfully. “I just don’t think that people are as honest as they used to be.”
Orsini suspects that when it comes to her friends and family dating online, the low success rate also has something to do with the higher number of people “looking” online today, versus the number of people who were “looking” through personal ads at the height of their popularity.
With the kind of technology available at our fingertips, singles have more options than ever before for finding love. Does having a gigantic online pool of hopeful romantics mean that everyone eventually finds exactly what, and who, they’re looking for?
Not necessarily, says 35-year-old Molly Corbett, a finance and operations manager at Stanford who lives in San Francisco.
“[Online dating] is like this endless stream of people,” says Corbett, who first gave it a go in 2007. She’s used it off and on for the past six years. “You just don’t even think of them as people,” she says of the faces that pop up on her device at any given time. “They’re pictures on a screen that you can scroll right through. I think it gives people a license to be flaky.”
Corbett has tried Match.com, OkCupid and apps like Tinder, Hinge and Coffee Meets Bagel. What she’s looking for is fairly straightforward: A committed relationship that leads to marriage and children. “Not necessarily a white picket fence in the ’burbs,” she says, “but just something more traditional.”
But what she’s found instead are guys who are not interested in real relationships, and many who “just want to have fun, and not grow up.”
“I think it’s reached like this fever pitch,” Corbett says of online dating. “When it first came out, it had a stigma to it. People were a little weirded out. Now, there’s so much out there. It’s almost like we have to start back at zero, and figure out how to meet people in person. Because it’s just not working.”
With the personals, Orsini says, someone had to put the ad in the paper and someone else had to make the phone call. “So right away, there was voice contact.” The first time she spoke to her future husband, she says, they talked for two hours. “I really got a good, strong sense of who he was. Whereas online, people go back and forth with emails and text messages before they ever even talk to each other.”
That’s one of the most frustrating parts of meeting people online, Corbett says. What if you spend days, weeks or even months sending messages back and forth to someone, only to find out that the person who you finally meet is not who you thought they were at all?
She shares a story about a guy who she met online recently who appealed to her because it sounded as though he too, had become fed up with the online dating environment. “He wrote a whole paragraph about how the online thing was ruining us,” she says. “That it was making people not treat people like actual people. I wrote to him to say, ‘I agree with that. I appreciate you writing that.’ We were trying to set up a time to meet. We picked a day. And then he backed out. He said, ‘I’m sorry—I’m just too skeptical about this whole thing. You really do sound great.’ That’s how he ended it.”
Do you think we could ever return to the age of personal ads, I ask her. A simpler time, when people weren’t overwhelmed by endless options? She pauses to think about it.
“I just don’t even understand how people meet people in real life,” she says, noting that for many singles, checking devices and meeting people online has become ingrained. “Everyone is just buried in their own little world.”
Stafford says that he thinks people in general—especially people under 40—are more fearful of strangers now than they were 20 years ago. “There seems to be a fear of people who aren’t safely contained in a digital device,” he says.
Corbett reconsiders my question about a potential resurgence of personal ads, even in our device-addicted dating culture.
“Maybe,” she says, with a little more hope this time.
Personal ads, she says, seemed to “get to the core” of who people were. You didn’t dismiss someone because you saw a bad picture of them—which is what many people dating online do today. A small flaw, rather than being a reason to swipe or scroll, could be something beautiful.
“Everyone’s being so specific about their criteria,” Orsini says of online dating, “that I guess you’re led to believe that the perfect person is out there if you just keep going through all those people.”
Does Corbett believe that her perfect match is out there? “Ummm … yes,” she replies. “Just because they have to be. Otherwise …you know, I don’t want to give up.”
Perhaps all that remains of the era of newspaper personal ads is what’s left on microfilm, and what’s tucked into photo albums. And the stories, relayed by those who reminisce.
“So much of it is about chemistry,” Orsini says. You don’t really know somebody “until you meet and look into each other’s eyes.” She laughs. “The old fashioned way.”
Last week, rather than running both a Hero and a Zero, we devoted our entire space to a brave man who deserved the full column. This time, we have a Zero, Amber, whose blatant racism qualifies her for all of the ink. This Sausalito resident’s ugly display occurred on Nextdoor, a social network for neighborhoods, which typically includes posts about community meetings, fundraisers and local traffic. It began when T, a young African-American woman from Marin City, announced that she had worked hard and saved money for a backpacking journey across Europe and asked neighbors to contribute to her trip fund. Some people encouraged T to follow her dream, but Amber berated the young woman, stated that her post was inappropriate and asked whether she lived in Section 8 housing and received food stamps. A few jumped to T’s defense, while others accused T of being dishonest. One man wrote that he never sees illegal immigrants asking for hand-outs; instead they are looking for work. Amber posted a missive with the racial breakdown of Marin City and statistics that she misinterpreted to conclude that “most people who live in Marin City live in Section 8 housing.” For the record, T said that she works three jobs and doesn’t receive subsidies. Even so, Amber, can’t people who receive assistance take a vacation? Geez. We have to wonder what the response would have been for a young white woman from Mill Valley trying to raise money for her post-college backpacking trip.
Got a Hero or a Zero? Please send submissions to ni***************@ya***.com.
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Do you know Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights? At one point, the heroine Catherine tells her friend about Edgar, a man she’s interested in. “He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace,” Catherine says. “I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine.” If you’re a typical Aries, you’re more aligned with Catherine than with Edgar. But I’m hoping you might consider making a temporary compromise in the coming weeks. “At last, we agreed to try both, …” Catherine concluded, “and then we kissed each other and were friends.”
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): People turn to you Tauruses for help in staying grounded. They love to soak up your down-to-earth pragmatism. They want your steadfastness to rub off on them, to provide them with the stability they see in you. You should be proud of this service you offer! It’s a key part of your appeal. Now and then, though, you need to demonstrate that your stalwart dependability is not static and stagnant—that it’s strong exactly because it’s flexible and adaptable. The coming weeks will be an excellent time to emphasize this aspect of your superpower.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): When winter comes, pine trees that grow near mountaintops may not be able to draw water and minerals from the ground through their roots. The sustenance they require is frozen. Luckily, their needle-like leaves absorb moisture from clouds and fog, and drink in minerals that float on the wind. Metaphorically speaking, Gemini, this will be your preferred method for getting nourished in the coming weeks. For the time being, look UP to obtain what you need. Be fed primarily by noble ideals, big visions, divine inspiration and high-minded people.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): We all go through phases when we are at odds with people we love. Maybe we’re mad at them, or feel hurt by them or can’t comprehend what they’re going through. The test of our commitment is how we act when we are in these moods. That’s why I agree with author Steve Hall when he says, “The truest form of love is how you behave toward someone, not how you feel about them.” The coming weeks will be an important time for you to practice this principle with extra devotion—not just for the sake of the people you care about, but also for your own physical, mental and spiritual health.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): After fighting and killing each other for years on end, the Roman and Persian armies agreed to a truce in 532 A.D. The treaty was optimistically called “The Endless Peace.” Sadly, “endless” turned out to be just eight years. By 540 A.D., hostilities resumed. I’m happy to announce, though, that your prospects for accord and rapprochement are much brighter. If you work diligently to negotiate an endless peace anytime between now and March 15, it really is likely to last a long time.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): “I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people, to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole.” Author Lauren Oliver wrote that, and now I’m offering it to you, just in time for your Season of Correction and Adjustment. The coming weeks will be a favorable time for you to get smarter about evaluating your allies—and maybe even one of your adversaries, as well. I expect you will find it relatively easy, even pleasurable, to overcome your misimpressions and deepen your incomplete understandings.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In June 1942, the U.S. Navy crushed Japanese naval forces at the Battle of Midway. It was a turning point that was crucial to America’s ultimate victory over Japan in World War II. One military historian called it “the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare.” This milestone occurred just six months after Japan’s devastating attack on U.S. forces at Pearl Harbor. To compare your life to these two events may be bombastic, but I’m in a bombastic mood as I contemplate your exciting possibilities. I predict that in the second half of 2016, you’ll claim a victory that will make up for a loss or defeat you endured during the last few months of 2015. And right now is when you can lay the groundwork for that future triumph.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Playwright Edmond Rostand (1868-1918) had a lot of friends, and they often came to visit him uninvited. He found it hard to simply tell them to go away and leave him alone. And yet he hated to be interrupted while he was working. His solution was to get naked and write for long hours while in his bathroom, usually soaking in the bathtub. His intrusive friends rarely had the nerve to insist on socializing. In this way, Rostand found the peace he needed to create his masterpiece Cyrano de Bergerac, as well as numerous other plays. I suggest you consider a comparable gambit, Scorpio. You need to carve out some quality alone time.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): “I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn’t.” The preceding reminiscence belongs to a character in Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner. I bring it up in hopes that you will do the opposite: Say the words that need to be said. Articulate what you’re burning to reveal. Speak the truths that will send your life on a course that’s in closer alignment with your pure intentions.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): According to some traditional astrologers, you Capricorns are vigilant to avoid loss. Old horoscope books suggest that you may take elaborate measures to avoid endangering what you have accumulated. To ensure that you will never run out of what you need, you may even ration your output and limit your self-expression. This behavior is rooted in the belief that you should conserve your strength by withholding or even hiding your power. While there may be big grains of truth in this conventional view of you Capricorns, I think it’s only part of the story. In the coming weeks, for instance, I bet you will wield your clout with unabashed authority. You won’t save yourself for later; you’ll engage in no strategic self-suppression. Instead, you will be expansive and unbridled as you do whatever’s required to carry out the important foundation work that needs to be done.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): “It seems that the whole time you’re living this life, you’re thinking about a different one instead,” wrote Latvian novelist Inga Abele in her novel High Tide. Have you ever been guilty of that, Aquarius? Probably. Most of us have at one time or another. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the coming months will bring you excellent opportunities to graduate forever from this habit. Not all at once, but gradually and incrementally, you can shed the idea that you should be doing something other than what you’re doing. You can get the hang of what it’s like to thoroughly accept and embrace the life you are actually living. And now is an excellent time to get started in earnest on this project.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): “Even nightingales can’t be fed on fairy tales,” says a character in Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons. In other words, these marvelous birds, which sing sublimely and have long been invoked by poets to symbolize lyrical beauty, need actual physical sustenance. They can’t eat dreamy stories. Having acknowledged that practical fact, however, I will suggest that right now you require dreamy stories and rambling fantasies and imaginary explorations almost as much as you need your daily bread. Your soul’s hunger has reached epic proportions. It’s time to gorge.
Homework: What could you do to free your imagination from its bondage? Read “Liberate Your Imagination:” http://bit.ly/Liberate.
Q: I’m a 35-year-old woman, and I’ve been involved with a guy around my age for almost two years. It’s been “open.” Well, that is, he’s had the freedom to sleep with other people. I haven’t wanted to. I finally realized that I am not happy with this and want more, but he made it very clear that he’s not interested in being monogamous—with me or anybody. I’m having a very difficult time cutting things off, as there’s a lot that’s great about our relationship. How do you leave somebody you really care about who you know is bad for you?—Stuck
A: It isn’t exactly a shocker that the thing you want to be asking your boyfriend when he comes home is not, “Hey, cuddlebug, how was your booty call?”
There’s this notion that being sexually sophisticated means being all “no probski” about your partner having sex on the “I love a parade” model. But it turns out that jealousy isn’t so easily disabled. Research by evolutionary psychologist David Buss suggests that jealousy is basically love’s burglar alarm—an evolved psychological warning system that goes off in response to threats to a relationship. So, sure, you can try to talk yourself into being cool with the sexual variety pack—just like when you hear your downstairs window breaking, you can try to roll over and catch a little more shut-eye while the burglars ransack your house.
It must seem kind of unbelievable to be so miserable yet so unable to keep enough of a grip on that to get out. You can probably blame the limits of what’s called “working memory.” It’s essentially a mental workspace—a kind of whiteboard in your head—where you lay out and kick around a few sets of information. These info sets are called “chunks,” and one example might be the experiences that make up the idea, he cooks me these wonderful dinners! But according to research by psychologist Nelson Cowan, working memory holds only about four chunks at once. We also tend to give priority seating to info sets that justify the choices we’ve made. So, all aboard for the he’s a great kisser chunk, the he was really sweet when I was in the hospital chunk, etc., etc. And whoops—whaddya know—seems there’s no room for he insists on having sex buffet-style.
You need to look at all the information at once, and this requires a piece of paper and a pen. On either half of the page, list the pros and cons of being with him, giving them blocks of space that correspond to their importance. For example, his home-cooked meals should probably get a sliver of space on the pro side, while his need to go home with Linda should get a big block on the con side. Carry this paper around and look at it until it becomes clear to you that you need to be somebody’s “one and only” and not just the one before their Tuesday tennis lesson.
Q: I’m a 32-year-old guy, and my girlfriend has been complaining that the only time I’m cuddly or affectionate is when I want to have sex. I don’t really see the problem. It’s my way of initiating versus … I don’t know, asking her … which would be weird.—Confused
A: Aw … how sweet … cuddling that comes with a trap door to the sex dungeon!
From a woman’s point of view, it’s nice to have your boyfriend, say, grab your hand, and not just because he’d like you to put it on his penis. This isn’t just some mysterious form of sexual etiquette. It comes out of how women evolved to be “commitment skeptics,” as evolutionary psychologist Martie Haselton puts it. Erring on the side of underestimating a man’s level of commitment was how ancestral women kept themselves from ending up single mothers with a bunch of cave-lings to feed.
Economist Robert Frank calls love “a solution to the commitment problem.” As he explains it, being emotionally bonded keeps you from making a coldly rational calculation about who’s got more to offer, your girlfriend or the new neighbor with boobs so big that each should be sending a delegate to the U.N. So, because women are on the lookout for signs that you love them, a hug is a hug is a hug needs to be the deal much of the time. Otherwise, whenever you’re affectionate, it’ll just seem like the boyfriend version of a wino telling a woman she’s beautiful—because it would be really beautiful if she’d give him the last dollar he needs to get drunk on cheapo aftershave.
One of the top 10 films of last year, and one of the finest ever made about the Holocaust, is Son of Saul, the 2015 Grand Prize winner at Cannes by the debuting Laszlo Nemes. It’s impressive in many ways, but the film’s successful blend of the closely focused with a leafy, transcendental finish is maybe the most startling. Shooting in 35mm film, Nemes takes a monochrome subject and gives it vivid, lurid color—the expressionist green of stricken faces are sometimes encrimsoned by the constant fires. “Bela Tarr was my school,” Nemes has said. The great Tarr’s seriousness, spaciousness and focus on the calamity of 20th century history are reflected in this distillation of 36 hours at Auschwitz.
Geza Roehrig is a “sonderkommando”—a trustee in the death camp, on hand to grease the wheels of the death machinery. During the routine of scrubbing bodily fluids off the floor of the gas chamber, Saul discovers something doubly remarkable: A boy who is still alive despite the Zyklon-B … a boy who is apparently his own son. While the boy dies, something in this shutdown man comes alive. Using favors and pleading, he claims the body in hopes of burying it with the traditional Jewish prayer, the Kaddish, to be performed by a rabbi.
“Apparently” is the right word to describe the kinship, since there’s some doubt among Saul’s fellow inmates about the identity of the boy. And there’s a counterpoint. The war is already lost, and the Nazis are accelerating the process of killing, intensifying the violence and fury of the camp.
Son of Saul’s model might be the Dardennes Brothers’ film The Son, which follows a subject from a distance of about three feet, as he carries out a mysterious, perhaps lethal errand. The superb Roehrig may have the thousand-yard stare of a traumatized man, but what he sees is in very close focus—we’re in his own personal bubble, and the carnage around him is all out of focus. He’s beyond shock. He’s slumped, trying not to be a looker or a listener (people not minding their own business get shot faster). Seeing the Shoah through his experience makes you feel that you’ve seen more of the camp than you’d imagined possible. Saul’s seizure of his own humanity through this insistence of a proper burial is a grand act of defiance.
By Charles Brousse
Question: What’s more frustrating than a puzzle that seems impossible to solve? Answer: A puzzle that is impossible to solve.
That’s how I felt while exiting the San Francisco Playhouse after the Opening Night performance of The Nether, a controversial recent play by Los Angeles-based Jennifer Haley. Playhouse artistic director Bill English (who also staged the current version)...
By Annie Spiegelman, the Dirt Diva
You may recall hearing about the light brown apple moth back in 2007. That was when a California Department of Food and Agriculture program began aerially spraying populated areas of Monterey and Santa Cruz counties. This resulted in hundreds of complaints of harm to human health and wildlife. The next step in the plan...
By Tanya Henry
Speaking with Jerry Navas, the newly hired 23-year-old pastry chef at Taste Kitchen & Table in Fairfax, the phrase, “The world is his oyster,” comes to mind. After a trip to Europe where he fell in love with all things French pastry, Navas changed course from savory cooking to sweet, and now hopes to introduce Marinites to...
By John Flynn
Sex trafficking has become a major focus of Bay Area law enforcement agencies in recent months. They’ve been especially fretful leading up to the Super Bowl at Santa Clara’s Levi’s Stadium this weekend.
The marquee event and human trafficking are connected by widespread predictions that hordes of cash-flush chauvinists will swarm into town for the costumed war play,...
By Molly Oleson
When Sandy De Long contacted the Pacific Sun offices a few months ago in search of something that she had misplaced, it wasn’t a phone call, or an email or a text message that brought her closer to a copy of the piece of newsprint that had united her and her husband nearly 40 years earlier. It...
By Nikki Silverstein
Last week, rather than running both a Hero and a Zero, we devoted our entire space to a brave man who deserved the full column. This time, we have a Zero, Amber, whose blatant racism qualifies her for all of the ink. This Sausalito resident’s ugly display occurred on Nextdoor, a social network for neighborhoods, which typically...
By Rob Brezsny
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Do you know Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights? At one point, the heroine Catherine tells her friend about Edgar, a man she’s interested in. “He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace,” Catherine says. “I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be...
By Amy Alkon
Q: I’m a 35-year-old woman, and I’ve been involved with a guy around my age for almost two years. It’s been “open.” Well, that is, he’s had the freedom to sleep with other people. I haven’t wanted to. I finally realized that I am not happy with this and want more, but he made it very clear...
This week in the Pacific Sun, you'll find our 'staycations' cover story, which features local campsites available through Hipcamp, as well as wineries in Sonoma and Napa. The North Bay has so much to offer, you'll never have to leave to 'get away.' On top of that, you'll find a piece on Governor Brown's proposed 2016-17 budget, a review...
By Richard von Busack
One of the top 10 films of last year, and one of the finest ever made about the Holocaust, is Son of Saul, the 2015 Grand Prize winner at Cannes by the debuting Laszlo Nemes. It’s impressive in many ways, but the film’s successful blend of the closely focused with a leafy, transcendental finish is maybe...
