As I mentioned last week, this weekend is so stuffed full of book events — oddly enough, most of them on Thursday — that this post covers only the next three days. Highlights are Bizarro, Ben Ratliff, Chip Kidd, Opium’s Literary Death Match, and the final SF in SF event for the year. Get all the details after the jump.
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[Images of Barney Rosset and the Tropic of Cancer ad courtesy of Double O Film Productions.]

Barney Rosset, the man who risked prosecution to publish Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in the United States, has been a personal hero to me ever since I first encountered the book in high school. Reading it — and his much finer book Tropic of Capricorn — utterly transformed my life. (Whether that was for better or worse is debatable.) In my hours of browsing at used bookstores, I started to take a careful look at anything that happened to have been published by Grove in the 1950s and 1960s. It led me to Sherwood Anderson, D.H. Lawrence, William Burroughs, some of Kerouac’s later stuff, Samuel Beckett, and — oddly enough — Henry James, whose reputation Grove helped to resucitate in the 1950s.

Barney Rosset is most noted for the battles he fought against obscenity laws. By publishing Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Naked Lunch, he provoked the censors. As Win McCormack, the publisher of Tin House, writes: “Through his legal victories in the resulting obscenity cases, as well as in one brought on by I Am Curious (Yellow), a sexually explicit Swedish documentary film he distributed, he was probably more responsible than any other single individual for ending the censorship of literature and film in the United States.”

And now Obscene, the 97-minute documentary film about Rosset, is receiving its San Francisco premiere tonight at the Roxie, at 7:00; a second screening is at 8:50. Directors Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor promise all of the above, plus “Rosset’s public fight against hypocrisy is inextricable from his tumultuous personal life: the same unyielding, quixotic, restless energy that upended centuries of law brought Rosset perilously close to personal destruction.”

Juicy!

The run is from tonight through Thursday, September 11, nightly at 7:00 and 8:50, plus Sat, Sun and Wed at (3:00) and 5:00. The Roxie is at 16th and Valencia.

Maybe I went to Sunday’s Good Magazine party at 111 Minna with expectations that were too high. But last year’s subscriber event seemed to draw a bigger and more excitable crowd, not to mention a larger number of sustainable and creative companies. Nau was notably missing this year, but that could be part of their near-miss closing and upcoming restart.

Still, to be fair, the sidewalk party and its solar-powered stage are a fun excuse to spend an afternoon sipping Dark and Stormys (or chai if that’s more to your liking). I like the work the magazine is doing to make young people more aware of international affairs, even if it takes boxed wine vendors to get us to put our money where our mouths are.

Last week, Jason Bond (interesting mashup of Jason Bourne and James Bond) a researcher at East Carolina University named a newly identified species of trap door spider after peninsula celebrity and rock legend Neil Young. The spider is named Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi, and was discovered in Alabama last year.

“There are rather strict rules about how you name new species,” Bond said. “As long as these rules are followed you can give a new species just about any name you please. With regards to Neil Young, I really enjoy his music and have had a great appreciation of him as an activist for peace and justice.”

Photo of spider, ECU News Services. Photo of Neil, Cover Lay Down.

Other famous namings of new species? Any suggestions out there?

I’m on my way out the door to catch Sugar Pie DeSanto at Yoshi’s on Fillmore. I’ll be the guy with the front row table on the right hand side of the stage hootin & hollerin’…

For those unfamiliar with Sugar Pie, she’s a local treasure who was raised on Buchanan street, as well as Etta James cousin and an R&B recording artist since 1955 when she got her start on Federal Records courtesy Mr. Johnny Otis.

Back in the day she recorded tracks with her cousin Etta and Willie Dixon that were hits on the Chess & Checker labels, and she’s still going strong today with her latest CD “Refined Sugar” (found on iTunes).

I caught her last year at the San Francisco Blues Festival where she stole the set she shared with the aged Jimmy McCracklin’. I was impressed with this diminutive lady’s feisty persona, with her seasoned & saucy sense of fun and frivolity.

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Planning Issues, A Scarf Drive, Parties, Eats, Openings, Closings, Sales, etc

For an update of local small biz happenings around the bay read on…
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San Francisco writer Stephen Elliott, the author of “Happy Baby,” “Looking Forward To It,” and “My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up,” is also the founder of the Progressive Reading Series, which raises money for progressive political candidates. The series’ first event this year is Saturday at 7:00 pm at the Makeout Room.

I interviewed Elliott by IM on Wednesday evening.

You founded the Progressive Reading Series as a way to raise funds for progressive political candidates. Is that still the goal?

Yes. Well, the first year, 2004, we raised money for MoveOn.org. The point was just to get authors more involved in the political process. Then, in 2006, we became more targeted, and picked individuals, like Nick Lampson, running against particularly evil incumbents, like Tom DeLay. We figured our donations were too small to really matter to a big organization like MoveOn. But for a congressional challenger, a few thousand dollars can go a long way.
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The Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley this spring will host a series of films starring the seminal New Wave actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, pictured here with Chantal Goya in the 1965 Masculin-Feminin by Jean-Luc Godard.

Léaud, who acted for decades as the alter ego of director François Truffaut beginning with The 400 Blows at age 15, also starred in films by Godard, Jacques Rivette, Jean Eustache, and Michelangelo Antonioni. As much as James Dean embodied the restlessness of American youth in the 1950s, Léaud embodied the “Generation of 1968″ French youth who was intellectual, anti-establishment, and effete, all at the same time.

The series begins Jan. 18 and runs through February at the PFA on the campus of UC-Berkeley.

This month’s Writers with Drinks features:

• Aimee Bender (pictured at right) (The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, An Invisible Sign of My Own, Willful Creatures)
• Ariel Gore (no relation to Al Gore that I know of), author of How to Becomes a Famous Author Before You’re Dead and editor of Hip Mama
• blogger Wagner James Au, who covers Second Life on the blog New World Notes
• Simone Corday, author of 9 1/2 Years Behind the Green Door
• and comic Edwin Li.

As always, hosted and MC’d by the amazing Charlie Anders, who has also recently become Senior Assoc. Editor at io9.com. (Earlier this week I interviewed io9 chief editor Annalee Newitz.)

At first I shrieked like a girl (oh, whatever) then practiced a few “from my cold, dead hands” for the bar this weekend — but it’s official. We San Franciscans can keep our (hand)guns, dammit. Snip:

Appeals court won’t reinstate S.F. handgun ban

(01-09) 11:53 PST SAN FRANCISCO - A state appeals court refused today to revive a ban on handgun possession in San Francisco, saying the measure that city voters approved in November 2005 conflicts with state law.

The First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco agreed with a June 2006 ruling by Superior Court Judge James Warren, who said local governments in California have no authority to prohibit handguns. Warren said a California law that authorizes police agencies to issue concealed-weapon permits implicitly forbids a city or county to ban handgun possession by law-abiding adults.

The San Francisco measure, Proposition H, would have outlawed possession of handguns by all city residents except law enforcement officers and others who needed guns for professional purposes. It also would have forbidden the manufacture, sale and distribution of any type of firearms and ammunition in San Francisco.

Prop. H was challenged by the National Rifle Association, which sued on behalf of gun owners, advocates and dealers the day after voters passed the measure, 58 percent to 42 percent. Enforcement has been suspended since the suit was filed.

In today’s 3-0 ruling, the appeals court cited its own 1982 decision overturning a San Francisco ordinance that prohibited handgun possession within city limits. (…)

Link.