Images from O-Town: Sheri Winston and happy hook ups

'Tis the season of red and pink, and it’s easy to get carried away by the effects of alcohol and hormones. “Wholistic Sexuality Teacher and Counselor” Sheri Wilson  wants you to have great “sensual interaction” and lots of it, and she’ll be in town Feb. 10-14 teaching what no one else will tell you plus other secrets from her book Women’s Anatomy of Arousal. (Details can be found at the hosting Florida School of Holistic Living.)

Below is another secret of Sheri’s that she shared with us upon request, her Sensual Interaction Guidelines. These are the things sane people should talk about before they have fun. Reading them over can sound a bit dry and preposterous, but when Sheri talked about them via phone, she pretended to have conversations between a woman and a man, both under the influence of one too many and swimming in chemistry. The results ranged from realizing that you’re too drunk to talk and it’s time to say goodnight to an agreement to use lube and gloves for anal play for a one-nighter.

(Also see the profile of Sheri Wilson in the Feb. 11 issue of Orlando Weekly.

Sensual Interaction Guidelines

Sheri, The Condom Fairy Says,

 “Just Because Its Hot, Sexy & Even Sacred, Doesn’t Make It Safe!”

1. Check in with yourself before engaging in sensual and sexual activities. Be honest and take as much time as you need to be clear about what you want to do or not do.
2. Communicate with potential partners. Be honest, clear and overt. Don’t assume permission, ASK!
3. Make agreements about boundaries and then honor them.
4. Honor prior agreements with others. Tell the complete truth about your agreements.
5. Discuss expectations, intentions and commitments before engaging in behaviors. 
6. If you’re all in agreement, have a Pre-Sex Talk.  If you can’t talk about it, don’t do it.  Remember, sex makes you stupid, so be smart and have this conversation before you’re highly aroused.  Tell the complete truth!

Include:

1. Who are you currently being sexual and/or intimate with?  Discuss current partner status and agreements.
2. History of sexually transmitted diseases
3. Testing history including HIV, as well as other STDs
4. What intimate sensual or sexual activities will you engage in?  What are your boundaries?
5. What Safer Sex practices will you use? What ‘equipment’ for what activity?

(Condoms? For vaginal intercourse? For anal intercourse? For oral sex on a male? Barriers for oral sex? Gloves?)

6. Contraception, if applicable.
7. Anything Else?
6. Consider playing in the safer realm of sensual activities. There’s a lot of fun to be had without contact of your genitals and the surrounding skin, or sharing sexual fluids and the accompanying risk of disease. You can still have a great and erotic time.
7. Be responsible and respectful to yourself and to others. Play nice.
8. Remember, it’s better to be careful then sorry!

First Shot: But enough about you

Let it be known that The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman really, really hates being the center of attention. And if you give her an hour, she’ll tell you just how much.

No, you don’t have to buy those Walgreens glasses to read between the lines of the hilarious attempt at self-effacement Waxman made yesterday, in responding to news that HBO is developing a series about the adventures of a fictitious Hollywood blogger. According to The Hollywood Reporter -- speaking solely for itself, and not for HBO or series co-creators Bill Condon Cynthia Mort -- the project’s context is the migration to blogging that’s been made by some “veteran Hollywood print reporters, including Nikki Finke, Sharon Waxman and Anne Thompson.”

In Waxman’s mind, that equates to the HBO crew “mashing up a character based on Nikki Finke, Anne Thompson and me.” (Well, at least she changed the order to put herself last. That counts for something, doesn’t it?)

And she’s having none of it. “All I can ask is: Please. Don’t,” Waxman writes -- er, blogs. “Maybe I’m reading the story wrong,” she admits – then goes back to pleading her case as if she absolutely is not.

“Seriously, guys, there's nothing narratively interesting going on at WaxWord,” she demurs. “Just sowing our little news garden over here.” (A garden that, one assumes, will now be full to bursting with assertions of humble embarrassment over the project at each and every stage of its development.)

But helpfully, she points out that she’s not averse to the idea of the series in general -- just her (wholly perceived) part in it:

“On the other hand, no one can deny the evil entertainment value of Nikki Finke (8,000 words in the New Yorker could barely cover it). That's got to be tempting,” she cyber-snorts.

Hey, remember that New Yorker piece? The one that pored over Finke’s influence at great length while reducing Waxman to the level of a Salieri-esque foil? Boy, that magazine sure can dish out the “evil entertainment value”!

“And a hint of Anne Thompson?” Waxman graciously offers. “Why the heck not? Just folks (and my friends at HBO, you know who you are): leave me out of it.”

So there you have it: Waxman remains tastefully above the fray, and she’d really like her “friends” at HBO to call her about it. Because she’s dead set on playing herself.

I’m sorry; did I get that right?

Images from O-Town: iMove_2.0:iCandy

iMove_2.0: iCandy

(7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, Feb. 5 and 6, at the Orange Studio, 1121 N. Mills Ave; $10 at door;
www.vocidance.org)

photos by
Matthew Simantov


Give Genevieve Bernard of Voci Dance an empty space and she’ll create her own world to share with others, even it’s for only two nights. Her sweet and sexy iCandy – the second in her signature “iMove” series – arrives like an early Valentine this year. “It’s like an art installation with breathing people,” says Bernard, who is the producer, director, artist, curator, nurturer and inspiration for the collaborative production, which was financially seeded by a grant from United Arts.

And while Bernard sees her interconnected, interactive vision in her mind’s eye as she follows through the creative process, the audience attending the intimate affair will feel woozy from the seductive mixture of music and movement intertwined with performance art (Brian Feldman), photographic projections (Matthew Simantov), cinematic illusions (Full Sail students) and stimulating surprises by DJ Nigel John and fashion designer Consuelo Bellini. Elegantly sensual, iCandy puts to shame other V-Day affairs that chase a more blatant interpretation of sex and come off crude by comparison.

First Shot: Hitler reacts to the Oscar noms

Made you look! Made you look!

No Shickelgruber here, sadly; he wouldn’t be crazy enough to get up this early. Now tell me again why I did?

Yeah, the 2010 Oscar nominees were full of surprises – that is, if you’re easily surprised by the largely inconsequential. Crazy Hearts’s Jeff Bridges managed to pull Maggie Gyllenhaal into the Best Supporting Actress race, and (500) Days of Summer got shut out of its one potential category, Original Screenplay. (Hope Marc Webb had that Spider-Man contract signed and in the mail by midnight.) And the little-seen In the Loop took an Adapted Screenplay slot that some (like EW’s Dave Karger) thought might go to Fantastic Mr. Fox.

And therein lies the beginning of our journey into the land of ossified thinking. Relegating Mr. Fox to the animation ghetto broadcasts the Academy’s perpetual commitment to compartmentalization. (Sure, Up made it into Best Picture as expected, but that hasn’t exactly been a beachhead for Disney projects since … uh, Aladdin?) And for all the buzz about the new (old) 10-nominee Best Picture category, almost everything that ended up in there was something that might easily have been included in somebody’s conception of a five-way race.

Sure, it’s nice to see District 9 on the list – in a five-picture field, it almost surely would have been elbowed out by Avatar. But making room for two “genre” entries is barely more significant than letting Precious and The Blind Side share the “Social Justice for QVC Shoppers” honors. Real daring would have been to throw in Star Trek as well – but it got stuck in the groove of the “popcorn” movie that gets good reviews and does respectably at the box office, but not well enough to break records and lead the industry into a new era of $18 3-D tickets. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Hollywood’s new forgotten category – the movie that “only” excels at its craft and is thus loved by millions of people (just not billions).

Making more room for films that aren’t typical awards fodder but are Correct For What They Are is what a 10-name ballot should be all about. (Exhibit B: Find me an actual comedy in there.) Instead, we get The Blind Side, whose nomination is only surprising in what it reveals about the depth of some people’s commitment to thinking Reaganomically in hard times. In nature if not degree, it’s no wonder that favor should find this picture, whose success has been dependent upon the philosophy that socioeconomic redress should be an individual choice made by rich, benevolent whites, and not an across-the-board agenda implemented by a representative government. (Tellingly, interest in seeing this picture was a hot topic of discussion among the highly comfortable white family that sat next to me at a restaurant last Thanksgiving – it almost crowded out their expressions of sudden worry about the deficit.)

So yeah, it’s not exactly a shock to see Tinseltown laud the ethos that Private Capital Conquers All. Just wait until they find a way to sell it to you in 3-D.

Being tortured by Mullally>Oscar noms

I'm here at the office at 8:30am on Tuesday, Feb. 2 and I'm not tuning into the Oscar nominations.

In truth, I'm only here this early (as I am most days) because I drop off my kid at school at the ungodly crack of dawn. But since I'm here, you'd think I could muster the energy to watch the announcements live. But I can't.

I won't bore you with a diatribe against the group-think mentality of the Academy, or their irrelevance at a time when technology enables cinephiles to champion independent film with a Facebook share, or how disgusted I was by the blog critics – who are supposed to be charged with keeping the lazy, cynical and WIDELY SYNDICATED! Crit-Circle olds in check with irreverence and brutal honesty – sadly buying into those same so-called "respectable" critics' opinions in a desperate attempt to reverse their rep as fanboys and parroting the same Top 10 you see everywhere else. Guys, be geeky. It's something to be proud of.

I won't bore you with that. Ahem.

Instead, I found my attention diverted by what's possibly the most soul-devouring two minutes I've ever seen.

You've seen that wildly unclever and tragic "Turn the Tub Around" Mullally commercial, right? The one where she dances around and pretends to be satisfied with her place in life while "talkin' bout nutrition?" Have you seen the extended cut?

Now there's a "behind the scenes, making-of" promo vid on YouTube, where the key players (i.e. brand specialists) congratulate themselves on something so "unique" and "relevant."

Seriously, it's like being waterboarded, only the water is fire and the board is also fire. And I'll still take that over the Oscar noms.

I was pointed to it by the Wrap's Josef Adalian.

First Shot: All that Razz

Hang on, because I’m about to start your week by doing something shocking and unprecedented: I’m going to castigate somebody else for being unnecessarily cynical.

See, the Razzie nominations were announced today (getting a 24-hour jump on the Oscars, the same way the actual awards do). And in addition to the usual “tributes” to the past year’s cinematic excretions, the ballot this time includes three categories meant to encompass the decade as a whole.

Yep, the March 6 announcement of Razzie winners will include the naming of the Worst Picture, Worst Actor and Worst Actress of the 00’s. But I have a beef with the way the nominations in the last two categories appear to have been compiled. It seems that whichever performers gathered the most “Worst Actor” Razzie noms for various films throughout the decade automatically advanced to the lightning round … no matter how much good work they might have done in that time frame, as well.

This is where the Razzies become an even more (and this time, not as delightfully) skewed reflection of the Oscars. When the scope of either contest is merely a year’s worth of work, we know that titles like “best” or “worst” are purely situational. “Best Actor” is merely media-friendly shorthand for “Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role.” It’s not an assertion that whoever wins was certifiably the best actor on Earth for the preceding 12 months.

But when you extend that focus to a full 10 years, submitting somebody as a potential “Worst Actor” isn’t an assessment of individual performances, but an assertion of consistent awfulness. You’re implying that somebody is practically incapable of doing good work.

Which is where the Razzies, I think, have erred badly. Eddie Murphy as a potential Worst Actor? Not in a decade that gave us Dreamgirls. Mariah Carey? Sure, Glitter got its share of brickbats, but Precious seems to have problematized the theory of her incompetence, just like everything Jessica Lange did after King Kong. (And pssssst … Mariah’s not that bad in Glitter anyway, certainly when one considers the old aphorism that it’s hardest to play yourself.)

And really … Lindsay Lohan? Practically every tsk-tsk that’s even been tweeted about her has incorporated some variation of, “It’s a shame; she was such a good actress.” And that “was” was as recently as 2006 (A Prairie Home Companion). How can somebody’s downfall be tragic if she was never any good in the first place?

What’s particularly sad is that this approach elbows out the thespians who really deserve to be nominated; they may not have grabbed headlines the way Lohan does (or did), but they’ve been plugging away unheralded all through the decade, assiduously avoiding anything that remotely resembles professionalism. And I suspect that here, just as with the actual Oscars, PR value trumps real artistic merit. Because how many media outlets would pick up a press release that announced a special achievement award for Tara Reid?

Images from O-Town: International Spore Project, May 2010

Hot off the press-release machine: Doug Rhodehamel's May mushroom spectacular – everyone is invited!

Who: Installation artist Doug Rhodehamel and you

What: International SPORE Project: Watch the mushrooms grow in May!

When: May 1 through May 30, 2010

Where: Orlando and around the world

Website: www.dougrhodehamel.com

Turn brown paper bags into mushrooms and plant a patch anytime during the entire month of May 2010 to play along with artist/educator/entrepreneur Doug Rhodehamel. The Orlando creative is coordinating a grass-roots, world-wide awareness campaign using mushrooms (a.k.a fungus and spores) for art and education. Rhodehamel's been doing installations for years, and his biggest solo effort to date counted 10,000 of his paper bag creations stamped with his website address, which were hand-placed into the earth at Loch Haven Park in Orlando for a week-long show.

Who can participate: Anybody. Plant an art mushroom installation at your home, office or school. Doug's SPORE Project invites individuals and organizations around the globe to create and install a zillion paper bag mushrooms during the magical month of May 2010. The mushrooms are to be photographed and the number of specimens noted, then posted so the project's progress can be shared by everyone.

The SPORE Project is a world-wide effort developed by Doug Rhodehamel to promote awareness for the support of art education and creativity in day-to-day life. The project illustrates the importance of self-expression, resourcefulness and creativity – he wants children of all ages to look at a simple item, like a paper lunch bag, and unleash the power of what it can be instead of merely what it is.

The inexpensive project has also been tapped by schoolteachers who can enhance the art component with a science lesson on the significance of spores, which are structures that naturally adapt for extended periods of survival in unfavorable conditions. Just like us!

Please help us celebrate the wonderful world of the SPORE Project, coming in May. But it's time to start planning. Read about Doug Rhodehamel and his mission at www.dougrhodehamel.com

Watch how to make them in several easy steps.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuNOnmcEFM4

You can e-mail Doug through his website: www.dougrhodehamel.com

First Shot: Whose little Runaway?

I don’t know how it’s taken so long for this issue to fly through my transom, but there’s something weird about the casting of The Runaways, the jailbait-rock biopic that premiered this past Sunday at Sundance.

And I’m not talking about the appearances of Kristen Stewart as the young Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie, Jett’s bandmate at the vocal mic. That’s traditional movie-biz folderol, a bid for distribution as predictable as the resultant critical praise for the starlets’ supposedly credible, down-and-dirty performances.  All it takes is for some method-acting day tripper to sneer twice and spit, and reviewers fall all over themselves declaring how “punk” the whole thing is. (Try watching Sid and Nancy and keeping a straight face at Andrew Schofield’s portrayal of Johnny Rotten as world’s most dangerous kids’-show host.)

So no, I’m not holding out hope that Fanning’s performance is going to do anything other than make me look at Amy Poehler in yet another entirely new light. But what’s got me really wondering is the apparent reduction of everybody else in the Runaways to the level of glorified sidemen (or should it be “side women”? You never knew with the Runaways!). After all, Lita Ford briefly rivaled Jett as the band’s biggest post-breakup breakout star, and her deadly-kissing metallurgy is still a staple of music-video retrospective shows. Yet in The Runaways, she’s allegedly a nonpresence portrayed by one Scout-Taylor Compton. Who? Exactly! (Although her IMDB profile says Compton once ran away from home herself, so maybe we should be giving her props for extensive prep work.)

Even weirder, the Runways bassist shown in the film is a character named “Robin,” which didn’t happen to be the name of any of the multitude of young women who actually pounded the four-string for the group. Actress Alia Shawkat (chasing Arrested Development paramour Michael Cera for those big-screen bucks) is playing a “composite character” created for ... narrative expediency?

Hahaha. Welcome to the music business. See, The Runaways’ most noted bassist was Michael Steele, who went on to be the only musician of consequence in The Bangles. That’s the sort of detail that, like Ford’s ’80s re-emergence, provides the “whatever happened to …” fodder on which movies like this usually stake their closing credits. Reportedly, The Runaways does indeed include such American Graffiti-style catch-ups -- but only for Jett and Currie (the latter of whose post-band activity ultimately amounted to a whole lotta nothin’). Drummer Sandy West (who’s named in the film) might as well have entered the witness protection program, such is her alleged character arc.

In other words, if Lita Ford was once in a band, but a movie about said band makes her out to be roughly as important as the timbales player for The Buena Vista Social Club, it means that somebody’s pissed at somebody. Or suing somebody. Or threatening to sue somebody over unpaid royalties. Or still smarting over a night of playful fisting gone bad. (Once again, it’s The Runways!)

And if you’re the director and/or writer of said film, and you neglect to mention that Michael Steele was a player in the story, it can mean one thing and one thing only:

You’ve received a “cease and desist” order from the Republican National Committee.

Cattle Call: Lots of cattle needed

Folks, there are the proverbial gajillion auditions going on, so I'm not gonna waste anytime on cutesies and cut right to copying and pasting the press releases. Enjoy!

ASPIRING BALLERINAS AUDITION FOR SUMMER CLASSES
AT WORLD-RENOWNED SCHOOL OF AMERICAN BALLET

Dozens of Orlando-area ballerinas will glide, leap and pirouette with the dream of becoming the next rising star during the School of American Ballet’s 2009 Summer Courses on Saturday, January 23^rd,  from 1:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., at  Orlando Ballet School, 1111 North Orange Avenue, #4, Orlando (407-426-1733).  Excellent visuals.  Children and school representatives will be available for interviews.

Only 200 of the more than 2,000 aspiring ballet dancers who audition during the 20-city tour will land coveted spots in the New York City School’s prestigious five-week summer program.

The School of American Ballet, founded 75 years ago by legendary choreographer George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, is the premier ballet academy in the United States and trains more students who become professional ballet dancers than any other American school.  SAB’s former students fill the ranks of the New York City Ballet and other leading U.S. and international ballet companies. 

            DATE:                       Saturday, January 23, 2010

TIME:                        1:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.

            PLACE:                     Orlando Ballet School

                                                1111 North Orange Avenue, #4

Orlando, FL

1/16/10 – Katie Corrie, Director of In the Limelight, a production company and theater school for children and teens, announces auditions for the spring 2010 season.  Spring productions include A LITTLE PRINCESS, Adapted by June Walker Rogers from “Sara Crewe” by Francis Hodgson Burnett (Performances April 29, 30 and May 1) and JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH, Roald Dahl’s fantasy adventure for children, dramatized by Richard R. George (Performances May 6, 7, 8).  

Auditions will be held on Saturday, January 30 at the Central Florida YMCA Aquatic Center, 8422 International Drive, Orlando, by appointment.  Auditions are open to children and teens ages 8-18 and all actors should prepare a one-minute monologue and submit a photo.  Audition appointments may be made by calling In the Limelight at 407-340-0920 or e-mail Katie@inthelimelightorlando.com.  Make-up auditions and call backs will be held on Saturday, February 6.  Production rehearsals for A LITTLE PRINCESS and JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH will begin on February 13 and will held at the YMCA Aquatic Center on Saturdays. Plays will be performed at Orlando Shakespeare Theatre's Goldman Stage, 812 East Rollins Street, Orlando. Additional information may be found by visiting In the Limelight’s website at www.inthelimelightorlando.com.

And again!

First Shot: Scott Brown’s sticky Fignus

In the immortal words of John Edwards, “I thought I knew that woman from somewhere.”

Leave it to our friends at HuffPo Style to point out that Gail Huff, mama bear of the U.S. Senate’s ookier-by-the-minute Brown clan, got her “start” in “media” by performing a mortifyingly suggestive bit of tube-squeezing in one of the most ridiculous music videos of the ’80s, “The Girl With the Curious Hand.”

But hold on a minute: I’m not without stain in this story, either. I’m ashamed to admit that, even before I clicked on the headline, I remembered that the artist in question was one Digney Fignus, and that the clip took top honors in one of those “Basement Tapes” amateur-video competitions MTV used to run to prove that people really do win … when they have informal industry connections.

You have to hand it to these Browns. Less than a week in the public spotlight, and they’re already doing their damndest to unseat the Palins as the Kennedys of the QVC set. After all, any reasonably resourceful trash queen can falsely claim parentage of her daughter’s out-of-wedlock offspring … but being outed as the Boston area’s forerunner to Tawny Kitaen? That’s, like, the Louvre of lowbrow.

Now I won’t be able to sleep until I find out if Jenny Sanford was ever known to pal around with Anthem. Or Messendger. Or The Slickee Boys.

I’ll stop now.

First Shot: Open mind, tight fist

Warner Bros. has passed the $1 billion mark in annual ticket sales. Avatar is on track to become the highest-grossing film of all time. And the movie industry is planning to make the next few years even bigger, better and more lucrative, in the only way it knows how:

By refusing to spend one goddamn dime on the product.

That’s the inherent message of a pair of development stories that have cropped up like weeds in the last 24 hours or so. Take yesterday’s official confirmation (following weeks of speculation) that Marc “(500) Days of Summer” Webb will be in the director’s chair for the upcoming total reboot of the Spider-Man series. Why Webb? Well, because he can dole out the kind of believable, indie-tested teen angst the producers are looking for in such a humble story.

Wait a minute … humble?

Yep, the buzzwords are all over the announcement of Webb’s hiring:  Sony co-chair Amy Pascal proudly proclaims that “At its core, Spider-Man is a small, intimate human story about an everyday teen-ager that takes place in an epic super-human world.”

Now, you shouldn’t consider yourself a genius for realizing that the imposition of an “intimate” direction on a franchise that was very recently reveling in its record-breaking effects budgets means that somebody wants to shave a buck. You should, however, consider me a genius for realizing it.

At least, I was feeling mighty Kreskin-like until Orlando Weekly’s cub reviewer, William Goss, alerted me to this story, which makes the agenda clear and overt. Highlights: Webb is getting a flat salary with the promise of performance-based bonuses, but no percentage of the take … like the 25 percent that Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire were going to claim were they to return.

But you know what? I’m not totally averse to the idea. Those classic Lee/Ditko issues of Spider-Man were B movies all the way, and I’d really like to see what a Spidey pic would be like if its makers were forced to focus on story instead of throwing in the latest CGI kitchen sink. I’m just trying not to dwell on the fact that the most nauseating aspects of Spidey 3 were exactly the sort of quiet, character-driven moments that we’re apparently getting in spades next time. (And which did nothing to advance our culture beyond making this write-up possible.)

Meanwhile, the sequel to Paranormal Activity is hurtling forward to a Halloween 2010 release, propelled by the same “spend nothing, flog shamelessly” ethos that gave us … well, Paranormal Activity. Director Oren Peli isn’t returning, because he’s being all uppity following his muse (and another troupe of poorly paid non-actors, no doubt) into Area 51. So the reins of the sequel are being handed to -- ready for this? -- Kevin Greutert.

Um, pardon?

You know, Kevin Greutert. He’s the guy who made Saw VI -- which got roundly bitch-slapped at the box office by Paranormal, inspiring much armchair-quarterbacking about the overdue death of torture porn. He’s the guy who’s going to keep the flag of this new movement flying high – and not so coincidentally carry it into a spook-season battle royal with Saw VII.

Had Sebastian Bach replaced Chris Cornell in Soundgarden back in ’94, it would not have made less sense than this boneheaded, backward-looking move. But there has to be a cost-benefit element to Greutert’s hiring as well, because P2 is one of the 10 to 20 “micro-budgeted” movies that Paramount pronounced the wave of the future as soon as Peli’s folly started scaring the bulk-purchased contraceptives out of college kids.

So in other words, the guiding credo of the film business for the foreseeable future is going to be “nothing in, garbage out.” That’s quite the business model – it just begs the question of what the studios are going to do with all that dosh they’re going to save.

I bet they send it all to Haiti.