Now that the Bay Guardian Wank of the Week has gone big-time, I've been a little worried that one day I'll open up the paper and find absolutely nothing to post. The crazy thing is that ever since I've been doing it, I've become so accustomed to the paper that even an essay that compares blogging to ephemeral movies is starting to make sense to me and I have no idea what the hell an ephemeral movie is. Which is why nothing made me happier this morning than to pick up the Bay Guardian and see that it was The Sex Issue.

Now it would make sense that this week's posting be something sex related, especially considering that this week is, as the Bay Guardian< puts it, "the sexiest weekend of the year" due to the Folsom Street Fair (and boy howdy, are they right on that. Having been a few times, I can say there's nothing sexier than old fat guys in bondage gear) but frankly, I fell asleep halfway through the sex-related articles. I tend to do that when reading articles that throws around phrases like "performative in terms of viewer response" and "barometric reading on our societal subconscious." Turned on yet?

So anyways, I'm going with something else this week. It's a review of a dance performance going on at the Yerba Buena Center of the Artsy. Apparently, the choreographer, John Jasperse, is big in France. The title of the piece is "California" which is what it's about. Yeah, I know, pretty original. Now while the writing of the piece isn't particularly on the pretentious tip, what's being described is- call it Pretension by Association:

"Jasperse's newest piece – and Bay Area debut – relays a sense of existential doom by using the state of California as a metaphor for broken dreams. Here, there are no Hollywood endings, and optimism quickly fades to cynicism. From the onset things went wrong: three women entered the stage, boldly ornamented with a hanging metallic-looking canopy … but the houselights remained on, as if due to some mechanical glitch.

Clad in blue mechanic uniforms, the dancers… seemed ready to repair the defects around them. They used leaf blowers to unfurl the canopy and blow it upstage, and later pulled on its strings until the mammoth structure partially collapsed. As California progressed, though, it became obvious the dancers were as broken as the material things they were supposed to fix. Set to Jonathan Bepler's dissonant score, which at various times screeched and halted, the choreography plodded along at a frustratingly slow pace. The dancers rolled on the ground in unison like a group of angst-filled insomniacs and dragged their arms to the floor as if physically unable to get up. During the more intricately choreographed trios and duets, bodies huddled en masse one moment and violently whipped through space the next. Apparently happiness and contentment are just temporary states of being.

When the dancers shed their uniforms to reveal ragged underwear, they appeared more vulnerable, but emotions remained absent. In the end, the music emitted several jarring, clash-and-clang noises between the sounds of a sputtering motor. Leaf blowers were placed atop two supine bodies, while next to them a dancer pulled at the never-ending cord of another blower."

I don't know about you, but I'm going to rush out and see it. You know, just reading about this makes me realize what I always thought was missing in ballet- more leaf-blowers. Yep, I gotta have more leaf-blowers, baby