Litquake concludes tonight with the famous Litcrawl in the Mission District. From the event page:

Litquake 2008 closes in high style with the wild and woolly Lit Crawl Saturday night, beginning at 6 pm! More than 250 authors appear in a three-plus-hour literary crawl through the heart of the Mission District. Three phases (6-7 pm; 7:15-8:15; 8:30-9:30 pm) will carry you through our version of the traditional pub crawl, from bars and cafés to galleries, restaurants, and even a few bookstores. Come get drunk on literature with hundreds of your closest friends. And best of all, Lit Crawl events are FREE.

New this year are the events in Clarion Alley, which is over by Good Vibrations. There will be music, readings, and an open mic event devoted to the theme of six-word memoirs, hosted by the publishers of the collection Not Quite What I Was Planning.

But there is more, so much more I don’t even know what to recommend. In fact, I’m sad that I only have one body, because for each of these hours I would like to be in at least three or four places at once. In the first hour alone: Femina Potens is hosting something at Intersection for the Arts. Travel writing is the theme of the reading at the Gestalt Haus. Adobe Books, as usual, is hosting the Here Comes Everyone Reading Series. Elixir is hosting their Bang Out Reading Series (where writers have been asked to “bang out” a story on a given theme). Food writing is the theme at 18 Reasons. And the Dark Room is hosting readings from the SoMa Literary Review.

See what I mean? It was exhausting just to properly link that paragraph.

These events get crowded, so if you see something on the schedule you really don’t want to miss, it’s a good idea to show up early. (Some people recommend skipping the second hour for that purpose, but is that really fair? I think not.) However, if you’re easily overwhelmed by choice, or just don’t feel like planning, there is such an overabundance this year that you could probably just walk at random and be entertained by any event you happen to stumble into — so long as you don’t mind trying to work your way into a dense crowd. Happy crawling!

Lads and Jockeys, which screens at 9:15 tonight and 4:15 tomorrow at the Clay Theatre, is Benjamin Marquet’s first feature film. In this excellent documentary, he takes on an unusual subject: a 40-year-old boarding school in Chantilly, France, 30 miles north of Paris, whose sole purpose is to train young people to run stables and ride horses. It is the largest such school in France, possibly in Europe, and only a talented few will become the jockeys who ride in professional races. Just as most music students enter conservatories with aspirations to become soloists, most of the students who enter this equestrian school aspire to become jockeys, the most glamorous profession in horse racing. But those who don’t have the talent for it — that is, most of the students — will remain “lads,” short for “stable lads.” In his film, Marquet charts the progress of three students during their first year in the school. It’s not an easy path. They are apprenticed out to current or former professional jockeys, and those men have little patience with unprofessional behavior, even when it comes from a 15-year-old boy. The jockeys, by their example and often harsh instruction, seek to instill a respect for the horses and a love for their craft. And these three boys, at least, rise to the awesome challenge. We see them develop, almost despite themselves, a truly professional attitude towards both success and failure. And we do see a measure of each. It’s a very engaging documentary, and I highly recommend it. Yesterday I had a chance to sit down with Mr. Marquet and chat with him for half an hour about his film.

How did you end up doing a whole film on this subject? How did you find the school?
After I studied anthropology in Paris, I lived in Senegal for a year, and shot my first documentary over there. It was a 35-minute short, and I came back to Paris with the movie, and people seemed interested in it. Well, my father works in the movie business also, and he loves horses — for 40 years he has ridden horses in Chantilly, where this film takes place. And he saw my first film and suggested that I do something about the whole world of horse racing. At first I was like, maybe not, because horses are not really my stuff, and working with my father — same thing, maybe a little bit risky! But finally, I said, “okay, I studied anthropology and I love Africa, but there’s no reason I couldn’t do something in France.” So I said, “okay, let’s try it.” I had no idea what Chantilly really looked like, what the industry was all about. So I said, “first, I’ll just go see what is there, and second, if I do something, it won’t be about horses but about people. So I spent a couple of days, and really quickly I understood that there are tons of characters there, all involved in horse racing in some way, and I would just have my choice. I mean, they’re all really original people, with extraordinary backgrounds.
(more…)

Last week I wrote about the upcoming premier of Macaframa and it sounds like it was a massive success. Of course I don’t know this first hand as I was out of town, and in fact I don’t even know it second hand because all the people I talked to who went ended up standing in line for a bit and then not being able to get in because the place was so damn packed. Which is a good thing if you are the guys who made the movie, but not so hot if you wanted to go and see it. But, sounds like it was a giant success.

Fixpert went and also couldn’t get in but posted a much more lengthy article about the scene at the theater with some talk about fixed gear bikes in general. Apparently they are all the rage these days.

Tough times can occasionally mean good deals for some, and a large commercial property investment group has decided to take control of almost 2 million sq feet of downtown Oakland office & commercial space . While the deal does not actually include all of Oakland, the CIM Group has closed a deal buying the city’s tallest office building at 1 Kaiser Plaza as well as several other marquee commercial properties. Amongst the buildings acquired were 1333 Broadway which is a ten story structure that encompasses the entrance to 12th St City Center BART Station. With these purchases CIM Group now surpasses Walter Shorenstein’s legacy real estate company which owns approx 1.5 million square feet in the downtown Oakland market.

The LA based CIM group initially took a giant toehold when it bought Oakland’s largest downtown hotel the 20 story City Center Marriott and it’s sister property The Courtyard in 2007. CIM Group in an effort to drink it’s own kool-aid, will move it’s Bay Area HQ from SF to Oakland in 2009, and run it’s operations which specialize in urban properties, including revitalized icons like Grauman’s Chinese Theater and the adjacent Hollywood & Highland complex.

I just watched KQED’s latest Gallery Crawl video (running time 13:43), and discovered that the show by “Lydia Fong” over at Ratio 3 is actually work by world-famous San Francisco native Barry McGee, who is still obviously keeping things cool. (If you don’t know about him yet, check out this great PBS feature page as well.) There is definitely a slightly different flavor to the work done under his pseudonym. In KQED’s video, he gives a fairly interesting tour of the exhibition, and it’s worth watching even if you’re not already a fan. Hi-res Quicktime is here, lo-res YouTube is here. If you have the time to get personal, the gallery is over on Stevenson at Duboce, a block west of Mission. The show will be up through October 18th, so you have just over one week left to see it.

The second half of KQED’s program is about Gallery 16‘s current show, a 15-year retrospective called “These Are the People in Your Neighborhood,” involving just about everybody the gallery has ever worked with. You can watch just the 7-minute segment devoted to that show by clicking here, and you definitely shouldn’t miss it. The (huge) retrospective runs through November 7th. In the past 15 years the gallery has come up a bit among commercial galleries; as interviewed artist Rex Ray put it, the gallery used to be on 16th, but now it’s on “glamorous 3rd Street,” at Bryant. But it has done so without losing any of its daring. Owner Griff Williams describes it as a place where artists are “free to fail.” And that’s a freedom that every artist needs.

[Images by the galleries named above; please click on them to visit their websites!]

Tomorrow evening at the Clay Theatre, the San Francisco Film Society will kick off their new fall series, French Cinema Now. The ten films comprising the series will be presented over five days, and together they provide a comprehensive picture of what’s going on right now in the French cinema, with just a touch of history included.

Three of the ten films are by a single director, Arnaud Desplechin, including the opening night presentation of A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noel). This was one of the most important French films of 2008. It was nominated for a Palme d’Or at Cannes, and it’s easy to see why: it explores the story of a family who have reunited for Christmas under difficult circumstances, and it stars Desplechin regulars Mathieu Almaric and Emmanuelle Devos, along with Catherine Deneuve, Chiara Mastroianni, and others. I’ve agreed to keep mum about the details until theatrical release, but I saw it this morning and can attest that the film is wonderful. The director himself will be present at this screening, presumably for a Q&A session. Other films in this series by Desplechin are his classics My Sex Life and Life of the Dead; the latter makes for a fascinating comparison with A Christmas Tale.

A bit of historical perspective is provided by Six in Paris, a 1965 film comprised of vignettes by Godard, Rouch, Chabrol, Rohmer, and the lesser-known Jean Douchet and Jean-Daniel Pollet. In a lot of ways the description reminds me of Paris, Je T’Aime from the other year: it’s an anthology of Paris stories of a particular time.

As for the other six films, check out the full schedule here, and I’ll be posting articles and interviews regarding some of them in the days ahead.

Litquake continues tonight with Opium Magazine’s Literary Death Match at the Rickshaw Stop, one of San Francisco’s newest and most creative reading series. The doors open at 7:30, a scant ninety minutes from now, with the show set to begin at 9:00. Word has it there are still tickets available. Half literary reading, half elimination contest, four readers get ten minutes each to wow the crowd with their genius. A panel of three judges discuss each offering in terms of performance, literary merit, and “intangibles” — then they select two finalists. The final round is always non-literary, requiring that the writers exercise something they’re not used to using — dexterity, for instance, or people skills. The contestants tonight will be Tom Perrotta (Election), Katherine Taylor (Rules for Saying Goodbye), Steve Yarbrough (The Oxygen Man) and Eric Puchner (Music Through the Floor); the judges will be, according to Opium, “last year’s LDM Litquake champ, Daniel Handler (Adverbs), Believer managing editor Andrew Leland, and hilartiste Debi Durst.” It will be hosted by Opium Magazine’s editor Todd Zuniga, and LDM’s west coast curator, Sky Hornig.

Annoyed with being on the West Coast and having our ballots counted after the election’s been called? You can vote early. From the SF County site

ABSENTEE BALLOTS and VOTING EARLY

* Any voter may vote early by Absentee Ballot (voting by mail), or they may vote early in person.
Mail in your Absentee Ballot to the Department of Elections:
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett
San Francisco, CA. 94102 OR
Drop it off at the Department of Elections
Room 48, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett
(Ground Floor, City Hall) OR
Drop it off at a polling location before 8 p.m. on Election Day
To vote early in person:
Go to the Department of Elections beginning January 7, 2008:
Room 48, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett (City Hall, Ground Floor),
Monday – Friday– 8:00 am. to 5:00 pm.
Saturday & Sunday, Jan 26 & 27–10:00 am. to 4:00 pm. (enter from Grove Street only)
You don’t have to give a reason for voting early.
Any ballot that arrives at the Department of Elections after 8 p.m. on Election Day will not be counted.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0AFpq6jFok[/youtube]

If watching that clip makes you feel both like jumping on your bike and hitting the streets immediately and at the same time not want to move because everything is so perfect and calm then you should be aware that is just a promo for the full length Macaframa film that premiers this week. Wednesday night (October 8th) at the Victory Theater on 16th in the Mission you can catch a screening at 8 or 10 PM. The showing is free and if that’s not enough bike action for you there’s a race before hand from the clock tower at Embarcadero to the theater, race starts at 6. If the web clips are any judge, Colby Elrick & Colin Arlen have done an amazing job collecting footage and putting it together for this production. If you like bikes and this city, it’s pretty much the only place you should be Wednesday night.

Think the economic meltdown can’t touch your high tech job? Valleywag announced today they are laying off three staffers, cutting writers’ “page view bonus,” and taking other steps in anticipation of lost advertising.

The layoffs affected two of my favorite bloggers, Jackson West and Melissa Gira Grant, as well as associate editor Nicholas Carlson (no offense to Carlson, but I’ve followed West’s and Grant’s posts for a long time). Here’s hoping they all find good homes.