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 | Four Artists Get Racy These days, art galleries abound with the kind of staid conceptual stuff that might raise your eyebrows just a notch but won’t necessarily do much to get the juices flowing. Just in case the latter is what you’re looking for, a new exhibition at the Heather Marx Gallery, entitled “Naughty” for simplicity’s sake, is pretty straightforward in its objectives: namely, to plumb the depths of the racy and risqué.More |  | Therapy for Your Inner Diva Union Street is saturated with a bevy of pampering mainstays, from posh eastern-themed dens to intimate hideaways that boast a single skilled massage therapist or aesthetician. The choices can be dizzying, and most likely you probably already have your favorites under lock and key, completely oblivious to the cluster of temptations that abound not more than two doors down. However, if you’re in need of a new place to coddle your inner diva, Primadona will happily pluck you out of the spa doldrums.More |  | Meat, Murder, and the Rest It’s an inarguable fact -- food and sex go hand in hand. You can’t, after all, envision a successful seduction sans the edibles, or an orgiastic Roman bacchanal without the proper libations, could you? That’s why we have so many foreign films in which scenes of voluptuous passion are paired with images of exotic feasts and savory larders, and why we have so many websites devoted to the fetish known as sploshing (if you aren’t familiar with the term, look it up) And if food and sex go hand in hand, meat is the ne plus ultra of primal urges, a truth that playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb has ingeniously captured in “Hunter Gatherers".More |  | Eight Artists Get Loony Here’s an etymology game that might seem patently obvious: derive the meaning of “Octonarius Lunius”. Most of you who had your Greek and Latin prefixes drummed into your head in grade school know that “octo” means “of or pertaining to eight.” “Lun” means “having to do with the moon.” The eight artists assembled in the eponymous group show might raise questions more relevant than word origins, but the “Loony Eight” is a suitable moniker for the crew, in only the most flattering sense.More |  | The Weekend Getaway If you’re anything like the people I know, vacation time doesn’t mean diddly squat. All the same, assiduous types who spend all their hours in the office or “out in the field”, for better or worse, can find suitable reprieves in spas, inns, campsites, and other such sanctuaries within a stone’s throw of the city. Weekend getaways for the harried San Franciscan, luckily for us, abound in great numbers. Whether you’re looking for a place to indulge all your five-star fantasies or if you simply want a rustic roost where you can temporarily forget about next week’s presentation, here are a couple suggestions for the serious pleasure seeker.More |  | A Comic Gag That Hasn’t Lost Its Edge Bad manners, lowly comic gags, and jejune slapstick humor never looked as good as they do in Jeune Lune’s ribald contemporary adaptation of Molière’s "The Miser". A 1668 play about a simpering curmudgeon whose notorious love of gold keeps everyone, including his two children, at bay, "The Miser’s" economy of language is wryly complemented by its skinflint protagonist’s scrimping and churlishness.More |  | New Visions of Masculinity Tim Gardner, Marcelino Gonçalves, and Zak Smith are the three artists whose pieces are featured in the “New Work” series at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art -- and they have little in common beyond their razor-sharp perspective on masculinity, in all its sinewy, culture-garbled trappings. While male artists are the classical bête noire of feminist critics (for adequate reasons, mind you), Gardner, Gonçalves, and Smith articulate a keen responsiveness to the problematic discourse of male-dominated art history. In interrogating formal art-making techniques, the three effectively turn conventions against themselves.More |  | Spa Therapy for Your Hands and Feet When it comes to the typical nail spa, you know the drill: a technician who doesn’t want to be there, much less make conversation, gives your hands or feet a cursory stroke before rushing into the treatment (likely smudging your nails in the process) and hurrying you over to a drying station before the next client plops into the chair you were just sitting in. Without the leisurely paraffin dip, soothing shoulder wrap, or service that makes you feel like you have all the time in the world, getting your nails done can feel more like being trotted down a conveyor belt of buffed and polished customers than a true pampering experience.More |  | Hidden Gems for the Skincare Buff There’s something about intimate, out-of-the-way skin boutiques that always catches my interest, way more than the overpriced, overcrowded spas that pepper San Francisco with their fussy, quick fix-loving clientele. A relationship with your aesthetician, after all, is about as significant as your relationship with your hairstylist…so you want to make sure you’re getting the optimal amount of personal attention…and that you’re in for the long haul.More |  | War and the Persistence of Memory By now, the rupture between history and its present depiction is par for the course in contemporary art -- but Binh Danh and Elizabeth Moy go at it one further in their haunting menagerie of images culled from personal legacies of war and reflections on the abiding effects of human conflict. In a collaborative exhibition entitled [b]Disrupted: A Photographic Installation About Memory, History & War[/b], Danh and Moy string together narratives retrieved and woven anew from both original photographs and archival images of the Vietnam War.More |
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