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As I had said in a previous article last month, I was giving Bikram Yoga a try. This is a type of yoag that you do in a 115+ degree room for aobut an hour and a half. I was on a $29 trial that they had for an unlimited month of using their studio.       At first, it seemed to be all right. I was stretching things that hadn't really been stretched before and while it was probably the most physically intense thing that I have ever done, I was sticking with it, despite the various pains I was feeling. About three weeks into it though, I realized that I wasn't improving and what we were doing in there was actullay aggravating previous injuries that I've had. Naturally I told the instructor about what was going on, to which they always said it was normal for beginners. I stressed the fact that it was really, really hurting and got the same response from them. Looking around the class, I saw that everyone else was doing the poses, so I assumed that the instructor must be right and I kept pushing myself into it.       It finally got to the point where I was constantly feeling pain in the tops of my feet and in my back and I went into my chiropractor, since he's one of the few people I've seen who has actually made me feel better in the long run. Turns out he knew exactly what was happening before I even told him I was doing yoga. He says that he gets a lot of business from yoga people these days, inferring that yoga is often done incorrectly.       Now, I have no doubt that the people at Funky Door Yoga know all the poses and have gone through the certification, but from my experience, the vast majority of them shouldn't be instructors. They don't understand how beginners are doing and they don't seem to understand that you may be nursing other injuries (such as previously tearing both my quadraceps in a fall down some stairs.)       They bill their classes as being for beginners, but they really aren't. Their classes are much more for intermediate to advanced students, since you need to have a good grasp of what you're doing before you start applying all the heat. I'm sure that people who have done yoga before would be able to move into their classes quite easily.       I guess my big gripe with them boils down to three faults: A) They're far too "Gung Ho" in wanting people to really push themselves beyond what I think a lot of us are initially capable B) They keep the room too hot for most people, since it will often go up to 120 degrees Farenheit, and C) They don't listen to people. The last point was really emphasized by the oblivious hippy girl I was talking to about the problems I was having, since she simply wasn't listening to me. In addition to that fact I felt like I was talking to tree that was intent on quashing everything I wanted to say, she helped to reiterate my theory that all white people who grow dreadlocks are the lamest people in the world.       I would highly recommend not going to Funky Door Yoga or other Bikram Yoga places in general if you're just getting started out. I still want to do yoga, but either do it at a non-Bikram kind of place, or just do it at home, since I know the poses now. That is, I'll do it once various joints heal from my Bikram ordeal.

What is happening now with gay marraiges in the US is interesting. Ultimately, it's going to be a rather large waste of time, since anyone who applies the letter of the law to gay marraiges can plainly see that you can't stop them since they discriminate against a group of people (unconstitutional) and are mixing up church in with state (also unconstitutional.) The first item is what Mayor Newsom keeps referring to and he's right. Of course the conservative christain groups don't see it that way since they believe that gays are evil and going to hell. Why they don't let God be the ultimate judge in this case, I don't know and I don't understand this screaming fear that they have. They're a screwy bunch and I'm very happy not to be part of them.       At any rate, Newsom has been chided for his recent spate of marraige licenses granted at City Hall. People in the Democratic party saw it as a bad move during an election year, giving Bush all the ammo he needs to get reelected, since people will be focusing on that and not the issues at such, like Iraq, the economy, and the fact he's an evil twisted piece of crap.       But, what's happened is something that I figured would happen in that this has forced the hand of Bush to fully back a Constitutional Ammendment to go up for ratification. This is ultimately a doomed motion, since the amount of states and people in Congress needed to get this written in, is just far too many for them to pull off and it would trounce on civil liberties so badly that it would be hard for anyone to back it.       I think what will end up happening is that Democrats will oppose it as well as quite a few Republicans and other individuals, since jumping those who have jumped on Bush's bandwagons in the past have gotten bitten by the fallout of them and this is something that just can't pass. It goes far above and beyond the control of one man, which is exactly how it should be as founding fathers intended it. My hope is that this will end up being just another fight that Bushie picked badly. He seems to keep doing this and I hope that Kerry has the wherewithall to pounce on these and keep them fresh to get that nutcase out of the office.

I just recently saw this rather attrocious piece of junk called The Real World - The Lost Season. The girl and I were looking through the local rental store things that seemed interesting and we came across this. It was about a Real World Vancouver which was never aired due to difficulties. We thought it'd be interesting, kind of a Lost in La Mancha (which is excellent) meets Real World San Francisco (which definitely had its problems.       So, from the start, we realized that these weren't real people. They were all actors playing stereotypes on your standard characters on The Real World. Okay, so it wasn't off to a great start, but maybe it will be tongue in cheek. MTV did produce Election and has some kind of sense of humor when it comes to larger scale production.       Nope, didn't go that way. These people were just back actors, trying to play normal people and it wasn't done in a funny enough, or schtiky enough way to make it funny, ironic, or show that MTV could laugh at themselves.       Ultimately the group gets kidnapped by some guy who had been turned down from the Real World and he holds them captive to be his own Real World. The guy playing the villain was actually good, but all he really did was emphasize how bad everyone else was.       Overall, it was a good premise. Not very original, since it smacked of Blair Witch, but it could have been good, funny, scary, dramatic or a whole bunch of thigns, but ultimately failed. Definitely, in the end a flick not to be rented. Not as bad as Spielberg's A.I. which I think is the worse movie ever created, but certainly pretty poor.

I know a lot of people doing a lot of art in San Francisco. I happen to be one of them, shooting my first feature-length work, Dying in your Sleep. A lot of the people here are remnants of what was the dot-com period and some are new to the area, attending one of the many, many campuses in the area that specializes in are classes. Of course, there is a sad fact in that, I used to know a lot more people that used to be here.       A lot of people ran for higher, or more to the fact, more southern ground when things started to fall apart around here and are now down in Los Angeles. I still keep in touch with a lot of those people and some of them have had success, some of them haven't, and others have yet moved into other areas to make an income.       It's kind of a sad thing to see really. San Francisco is a fertile area to have a counter-culture film movement. The Chronicle would make you think that it's still alive and well with how many ridiculous articles they do on Francis Coppola and George Lucas who are, in truth the only big film people left aroudn up here and they're hardly indie people. Lucas makes his money working with Hollywood types and Coppola has lately been churning out mediocre films with MGM (Jeepers Creepers, Jeepers Creepers II, Pumpkin...)       I don't know what it would take to really kick indie film in the ass and get it really happening around here, so that people who wanted to make different films than what Hollywood offer could work here and still be able to eat. It probably would have taken a different mayor than Willie Brown who seemed to see little interest in helping the film community grow and instead ultimately doomed the area by giving dot-coms and other companies the reach around needed to get them in here, remodel SOMA and then vanish. Hopefully Newsome will provide more incentive to smaller productions to film here. We do have a local SAG office and they're a helpful group, trying to get productions off the ground as much as possible. But, in reality, Newsome is taking on some bigger issues first like gay marraige and I very much respect that.       I guess it all boils down to the fact that for indie films to make it here, there needs to be a grass roots effort. The city and others with money need to plan the seeds so that we get more than guys like me, running around with a small camcorder shooting a film for $3500.

With the latest bundle of nearly 2,500 couples of the same sex married at City Hall in San Francisco lately, there have been a lot of metions of the gay and lesbian populations in general, including a large group of gays that are Republicans. Gays that are Republicans?!! If I was drinking something, I'd do a spit take.       I understand that if you have a whole lot of money, then the Republican party can be mighty appealing, since they keep dropping taxes from the rich and it's widely assumed that the upper class pay no taxes, leaving the burden of it all on teh backs of the middle class. I ascribe to that believe and also the one that the Republican party is pretty much composed of old white guys, their complacent wives, and people who have allowed themselves to be misled somehow. The gays would be a group I feel are definitely in the later class.       In case you haven't been watching the news, all you seee Bush surrounded by are old white men, who happen to be CEO's of failed or bought-out-and-they-got-rich companies. Case in point is the partial birth abortion bill in which he was surrounded by these white men in their black suits, all with lurid grins on their faces as they felt they were putting women back in their places as simply a womb for their lacivious offspring. I truly hope to never see that again, since it made me shiver.       So, why in the hell are these gays part of the Republican party? This is a party that keeps tossing around "God this" and "God that" and "God will send gays to hell" and Bush stating that he feels a constitutional ammendment is neccessary to define that marraige is between a man and a woman. I simply don't get it. Why on earth would you ever want to side with a party whose biggest name is saying something like that? Who is invalidating your relationship and you as a person. Who is saying that you are wrong. It makes no sense.       I've been trying to wrap my head around this for awhile and can't for the life of me figure it out. Guess I'll give up, let them make their choice, no matter how misguided I feel it is (that is one of the rights in their country afterall) and try and finish my movie.

There's a certain media trial which is gaining a lot of attention right now and one article in the SF Chronicle seems to be convinced that all the attention is due to us, the dirt hungry of the world. Read the article for yourself - http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/02/15/BAGV351FPA1.DTL and then read my corresponding yelp from a little while back here       I'm really really fed up with this. I emailed the author of the article explaining that as well. I would also recommend that all of you who hate this kind of sensationalism to write to her and anyone else, since they are convinced that we want to ehar the details about some poor woman's death.

Apparently, instead of solving the world's problems or even solving our own, the new obssesion with middle to upper class America is white, bright teeth. Possible you or something that you know has been afflicted with this condition, so watch out.       It's a funny thing really, since you can always tell who has had their teeth whitened, since this get this kidn of translucent, unhealthy English skin white to them. That's what I noticed was really the problem with it all, since these teeth they're getting don't really look white, they look completely artificial and honestly, not very appealing.       But, people are still doing it and I admit that there are people who could probably use one treatment, once, and then just take care of their teeth from that point on. These treatments are expensive though and aren't really any substitute for better living, since it's all the junk that we eat that causes a lot of the staining (coffee and tea do as well, but that's a different issue.)       So, I give to you, my secret to whiter teeth that's not only healthy, but costs about $2.00 when you get it on sale. This secret is baking soda! You use it about every other teeth brushing and you'll get gleaming incisors that don't get that weird fake whitened glow to them. The only drawback is that you may not like the flavor of baking soda or the grittiness of it, but is that's the case, then my friend, you just aren't committed to the whitening process now are you?

Lately there has been a lot of controversy surrounding the Atkins Diet, which in my best estimation is just a starvation racket that's going to cause a lot of heart disease among other things when people get older. It's just one of the latest trend diets that once again ignores the fact that if really want a good diet that will make you thin, then go vegetarian, or even vegan. The folks that stick to these diets are generally pretty darn trim.       I think that what it all boils down to is the fact that Americans are too fat and they're always trying to trim up, when in reality they don't want to do anything about it. This is the impetus behind the whole diet craze in this country, since being obese seems to be a common American trait as well as laziness. You mix the two together and you get fat people that keep getting fatter.       The real cure to all these diets is for people to walk more. We drive too much and we watch too much TV and we don't get out enough and we and we... Well, we just don't try hard enough to not sit around the house. I think one of the reasons there are lesss massively obese people in large metropolitan areas like New York and San Francisco is the fact that people walk more and drive less due to the fact there is a public transportation network that can get you anywhere, but you need to walk a little to get to it.       So, in a nutshell, you combine the American way of life with the American types of food and you get the American waistband. The solution? Not these whacky diets that are doing god knows what to you, but exercise, simple exercise, like walking one or two kilometers a day.

It's amazing what happens when you watch the Grammy Awards and suddenly most all of the music you hear (Celine Dion excepted) sounds pretty good and you wouldn't mind listening to it regularly. That's either a sign of getting old or music bending itself more to my taste. Since the music industry is pretty much run by nitwits who just care about money and the Beatles only won something like four Grammies their entire career, I'm guessing that I'm getting soft in my musical tastes, or more mainstream, or whatever you want to call it.       Don't get me wrong, I still love Radiohead and find them to be my favorite band, but some of the other groups like Coldplay, Outkast, and hell, even Beyonce and Christina have got some catchy business happening in their tracks. You know, maybe the music industry has shifted a little. The Grammy show that I saw last night was more relaxed than any show I've seen in the past and it was actually entertaining for the most part, especially since Celine's microphone started going on the fritz during her song. Most of the performers seemed to be having a much better time in the past and while you can't really take the Grammy Awards seriously the artists who won, were, I felt probably the best choice in that category.       One other facet of the show that was uplifting were a lot of the understated and not so understated mentions of Mr. Bush and the impending election. From an Englishman endorsing John Kerry to the fellow who spoke at the end (I think he was the director of the awards or something) who said we should be looking for "Weapons of Mass Education" instead, it was very nice to see that there are indeed some intelligent people in the world and it's not just hardcore left wingers like Michael Moore speaking out at the award shows. People genuinely hate Bush and while an angry people are a dangerous people, they are also a people that want change and with someone like Kerry potentially being the only choice to Bush, it could very well by the end of BushCo Nov. 5       On another note, the Janet Jackson comments were pretty downplayed and it seems that most people just shrugged it off as people should do for the most part. France and the rest of Western Europe must have gotten hoarse laughing at us and our prudish ways by now, so it was very nice to hear the voice of reason say shutup already.       Oh yeah, Outkast's number was solid.

Lately I've been taking this fast, express system to get around San Francisco. It's pretty amazing really. It will get you anywhere you need to go, it will do it faster than anything else, and it's free. Naturally, I'm talking about my two feet.       This is an exagerration of course, since trying to get from thw downtown area out to the Outer Sunset would be tough, since it's about seven miles (eleven kilometers) and that would take one dandy long time to cover on foot. But, thankfully, I don't live anywhere near the Outer Sunset, I live in downtown and everything I need to do or see is in walking distance.       It is true though, that this is probably the faster form of transportation in this area, since both buses and taxis are dreafully slow. The taxis have the added negative of being very expensive and driven by guys who either don't know where they're going or are tyring to take the longer route to get to your destination. Bus routes are limited of course, but they are cheap. Natrually they have their problems as I've complained... er discussed about before - here       I think that the best part of running around on foot is that you get to see things you miss when you're dazing out in a vehicle, such as a small little protest I saw on Market street as I was walking down to 2nd street. Kinda of a weak protest, but it had some good constumes, including this one that was a bride and groom with Bush being the groom and the bride being "Big Oil" and the bride was "giving it" to the groom.       Now, I'm not a staunch supporter of walking and certainly wouldn't mind taken public transportation if it were better. I really wish that the system was given a facelift in this city, since a system like this works very well here, due to the compact nature and limited scope of the size of the city.       Having had my fare share of taking lousy rides from taxi drivers and nearly getting hit by the idiots who are running red lights, I think we should ban taxi and limousine services in city limits. This would force people into taking public transportation and demanding that it runs more frequently and reliably. I don't know, just a thought to fix up a system that's already there and just needs a little something more to make it parallel such an expansive system as the New York subway or London Tube.