Today and tomorrow, Stacey’s Books is continuing their semi-annual License to Save for Literary License holders (it’s the store card). That’s 20% off anything in stock except periodicals. Now’s your chance to stock up on those Best American anthologies at a discount!

No book events (to my knowledge) are going on tonight.

But tomorrow November 8th is a big day:

First, Kathi Kamen Goldmark will be honored as the recipient of the 2008 Women’s National Book Association Award at the Century Club of San Francisco, in an event from 4:30 to 6:30 PM. Tickets or RSVP (for members) here. Amy Tan will be a guest speaker.

Kemble Scott says of Ms. Goldmark:

It would be tough to find a person who’s contributed more to the local literary scene. Kathi Kamen Goldmark helped launch Litquake, Book Group Expo, and The Rock Bottom Remainders - and her work as a literary escort means she has some of the best author anecdotes in publishing. She’s an accomplished writer and musician herself, making her one of the jewels in the Bay Area’s literary crown. Bravo!

Another event Saturday is at 7:00 PM at Book Bay Fort Mason (Building C). The San Francisco International Poetry Festival presents Vietnamese Poets of the Diaspora. Free event.

Your third option is something involving a little more booze and perversity. If that’s your thing, head out to the Make Out Room (22nd at Mission, don’t act like you’ve never been there) at 7:30 PM for Writers in Drag, featuring Michelle Tea, Austin Grossman, Stephen Elliott, Annalee Newitz and Jaime Cortez. The doorkeepers will exact a teensy-tiny cover charge of $3 to $5.

Sunday the 9th at 3 PM, Glen Park’s Bird & Beckett features Jeff Kaliss discussing his book I Want To Take you Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone. B&B owner Eric says: “Author Jeff Kaliss is a local hero, and for his book he scored the first face-to-face interview Sly has granted in 20 years! He even got Sly to write the intro and George Clinton to write the preface! Don’t miss this one!”

Funny thing, Sly’s been in the news lately. (Thanks for that item, Allan!)

Monday, November 10th has its own slate of literary events to watch out for, including Alison Bechdel (author of Dykes to Watch Out For) at the Booksmith on Haight at 7:30 PM.

Also, Lambda Literary Award finalist Sarah Schulman, author most recently of The Child, will appear at 7:30 at Books Inc. in the Castro.

Note: the John Hodgman/Dave Eggers event at the Herbst Monday night is already sold out, and I’ve been advised that rush tickets are not likely to become available for this one, considering the great fame of both authors. But if you’re a total Hodgman nut, fear not:

John Hodgman will make his next appearance on Tuesday night the 11th at 7:00 PM, at Book Passage in Corte Madera, which is just over the Golden Gate Bridge, at 51 Tamal Vista Blvd. The event is free, and if you show up early enough, you’re likely to get a good seat.

Wednesday the 12th at 7:00 PM, City Lights brings Charles Robinson & Al Young, who offer Jazz Idiom, a book of photography by Robinson and commentary by Young. Knowing these two, it’s bound to be a cool night, and it looks like a beautiful, fun book.

There are so many great events next Thursday and Friday, I’ll have to prepare a special edition of the Word Nerd early next week. Til then!

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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!] Comments are off for this post

It’s Matcha time! The Asian Art Museum hosts their Matcha event series on the first Thursday of every month, from 5 to 9 in the evening, and tomorrow, October 2nd, is that special day. The theme for tomorrow’s event is Japanese Tattoo:

There’s more to getting inked than you think. Takahiro Kitamura — aka “HORITAKA,” apprentice to the revered master Horiyoshi III — is an author, prolific tattoo artist, and owner of San Jose’s State of Grace. He will deliver a talk on the time-honored art of Japanese tattoos, a rich culture of beauty, commitment, and history.

See LIVE demonstrations of employing both traditional (no electric needles!) and modern techniques. Joining Horitaka’s diverse, talented crew of tattooists are special guests from Japan — Shige, a powerhouse tat artist who’s showcased all over the world; Mutsuo, who’s designed for Bathing Ape and Hysteric Glamour; and Kazunobu Nagashima, a client of Shige who will proudly display his backpiece, which won a 2007 Milano Tattoo Convention award.

In addition, dip into the world of Zen among ancient Samurai warriors through a guided tour of the galleries, learn about Japanese altars, sample teas by Ito En, soak up DJ Saiman’s aural offerings, enjoy a cocktail with friends, and much more.

The museum is on Larkin next door to Main Library. Admission is $5 after 5 PM, and as they imply up there, for that awesome price you get the run of the museum. Their special exhibition at the moment is Arts of the Islamic World from Turkey to Indonesia, featuring artifacts from the museum’s collection. (They’re tooling up for a big show about Afghanistan that won’t open for three weeks. But we’ll talk about that next month.)

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Today C.W. Nevius has a column on the latest, scariest crime to hit Glen Park: the carefully planned robbery last Friday night of Buddies Market, and the brutal, gratuitous attack on the store’s owner, Paul Park, who survived — just barely.

Glen Park has been subject to a wave of robberies in the past six months, mostly random street muggings. The reasons are obvious to anybody who spends as much time there as I do: BART station, freeway on-ramps, and residents who generally have iPods or laptops with them. Residents, I might add, who are smart enough to hand the goods over without a fight. No wonder predators are drawn to the neighborhood from miles away. Nevius writes of them: “No one knows who they are or where they are coming from.” Technically true, but residents have their suspicions, and unlike Nevius I’ll tell you exactly what they suspect: thanks to BART, the sociopaths living in Oakland and Richmond are right next door. What with the downturn in our economy, it’s likely that this is a problem that won’t go away.

The solution to this problem is obvious: a small number of officers in conspicuous locations in Glen Park during the times of greatest risk, from about 8:30 PM until 1:00 in the morning, especially on Friday and Saturday nights. How difficult could it possibly be to protect the residents of Glen Park from these crimes? Captain Denis O’Leary of the Ingleside station claims his hands are tied, but give me a break. You don’t need to mobilize a riot squad. He has 109 officers. The presence of a single police vehicle parked in the bus stop at Diamond and Chenery, with two officers nearby, from 8:30 PM until 1:00 AM every night, and two more officers conspicuously posted outside the BART station at the same time, should be enough to deter most of these crimes. We’re talking about four officers at most for nine hours a week.

Was a police car posted there last Friday night? Somehow I doubt it. Maybe this isn’t a good long-term solution, but as an emergency measure? Seems like a no-brainer to me.

The Glen Park Merchant’s Association has started a blog so that residents will have a place online to discuss the problem. The president of the association has started a fund where you can make donations to help with Mr. Park’s recovery.

What do you think? Leave a comment here.

[NB: I'm not a resident of Glen Park, but I work there almost every day and know several people in the community.]

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Chatting with XOX owner Jean-Marc Gorce about how all of the local shops are either closing up or feeling a serious pinch - he laid off 3 workers- because of a rash of ADA suits against them for non-compliance. Written up in June in the Chron, and covered on CBS (though not aired yet), it seems very sad. There’s a slanted step near his doorway that is in question, and he can’t provide a ramp as he can’t touch the sidewalk. North Beach Sushi across the street has the same issue. Their ramp is deemed too steep. I’ve seen the ADA racket threaten businesses in other towns, and they ended up closing. The owner has never gotten a formal complain from a wheelchair-bound person, except for this suit. Every business on the block has issues. It’s sad that we can’t get the city to help mom & pops get in compliance. Anyone from the handicapped community want to chime in on what’s going on? I welcome the viewpoint.

Interesting follow-up articles:
The Price of Access: Part 1: Visionary law’s litigious legacy in the Sacramento Bee
PBS: A Decade With the ADA
ADA Filing Mills: Drive By Lawsuits in the blog OverLawyered

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Residents and shopkepers of the Castro district are getting tired of tour buses full of “gawkers,” reports the Chronicle’s C.W. Nevius. It wouuld be one thing if they bought lunch, but a deli owner reported:

They come in here, 15 or 20 at a time. They look around, take a picture, and then they walk out. In the last three months I’ve sold one bottle of water. It is not worth having so much traffic.

Supervisor Bevan Dufty says the plague can be exorcised by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. But let’s not forget the famous response of the Summer of Love hippies on Haight St, as recalled by Mick Sinclair in his book San Francisco: A Cultural and Literary History:

On Haight St. some hippies responded to the busloads of gawping tourists by holding up mirrors, inviting the “straights” to look at themselves.

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The Bay Area is full of tech innovators, and seldom are the achievements of the entrepreneur who operates outside of Software, Internet or Biotech recognized. Ellen Raynor the owner/operator of SF Carpet Recycling is the kind of person I’m talking about. Full disclosure, Ellen is a close family friend, but I think you will agree her efforts are commendable in taking recycling to the next level.

SF Carpet Recycling is a collection site for post consumer carpet and carpet pad for the San Francisco Bay Area. Conveniently located in the 3rd Street corridor in the southeast part of San Francisco, we accept used carpet for the purpose of recycling.

For every 10 million pounds of post-consumer carpet recycled:

• 50,000 cubic yards of landfill space is saved

• 70 million pounds of GHG emissions are avoided (CO2 equivalents)

According to the 2006 CARE Annual Report

Planet Green video and more info

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Earlier this year Whole Foods and the owner of the propert where Cala foods is located proposed a new development, including housing and a full service Whole Foods market. The project has been met with deft opposition by the HANC (Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council). An organization that seems to largely be concerned with protecting their own vision of the Haight and their political clout is significant.

The Haight Ashbury Improvement Association is taking a much more progressive stance and is in favor of the project. Long story short, if you live anywhere close and have a point of view, the time to speak up is now, and the person to talk to is Ross Mirkarimi. Email him at ross.mirkarimi@sfgov.org .

Statement to HAIA and poll

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Ask yourself:

1) Do I LOVE Zombies?
2) Would I like to support local filmmakers?
3) Do I absolutely NEED to see a movie where a free puke bag is handed out?

IF you answered yes, Yes, YES!!! Then please proceed to the Victoria Theater at 16th and Mission for a limited theater release of RETARDEAD!

Retardead is a sequel to the heart-warming “Monsturd”. This movie has everything: an evil doctor, some mentally and mortally-challenged flesheaters, and the sexy Living Dead Girlz.

As I mentioned, they are handing out a limited amount of puke bags, which you may actually need in a few parts.

Last night they had a question and answer after the show.

When I asked how much blood was used, they said about 15 gallons. Now that’s art!

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I washed my dog this morning, clipped his nails and got out the door to go see the vet for his regular check-up. Because I did not have any cash on me, I walked a little further to get coffee, to a place that takes cards.

I go in this place frequently enough. Though the “law” says dogs cannot go into food establishments, both of my closest coffee shops allow them. When I bring the pup in there, I carry him in my hoodie, just to be respectful of others.

Today, I go in and order a mocha and bagel to go. I have my dog on my shoulder.

I’m waiting for my food, when I get the feeling that someone is staring at me. I look around and my eyes land on one of the most foul specimens of human waste I’ve ever seen. Literally, this man is the human version of “Jabba the Hut”. He is a desending pile of tires of fat, rings of flesh telescoping towards the ground. He is shaped like a fleshy soft-serve, ice cream cone. His skin is yellow from jaundice and his eyes are bright red in the lids and whites, showing “Pink Eye” at the very least.

This foul man-pile yells at me from his stench-seat, “The dog goes outside”. I reply, “Are you the owner? I’m not leaving him outside.” I go back to waiting… “It’s the law” says flesh-sore-man, “Are you above the law? I’ll call the Board of Health.”

I grab my stuff to go and say to him loudly, so the whole cafe gets the message, “When you call the Board of Health, tell them you have a full-blown case of the infection known as “Pink Eye”, and that everything you have touched, including that stainless steel spoon someone else will later use, is infected.” I continue, “Tell them the money you gave the cashier, has now been handled by the same people handling the customer’s food. Tell them you have now exposed your infection to everyone in the cafe. Maybe you should think about THAT next time you worry about health codes…”

Do I need to take my 4th Anger Management class? YES.

Is it ridiculous that in San Francisco, an 8 pound, freshly-bathed dog is a health hazard, when in EVERY corner of this city, the average San Franciscan comes upon human fecal matter on every train, door handle, cafe, bathroom they use because this city is swarming with filthy, homeless crackheads?

YES, more than I need Anger Management, YES.

I pick my dog’s crap up, no matter where it lands. EVERY DAY when I walk to work, I dodge SEVERAL piles of human waste. The people who made those piles can go into any establishment they like. But I can’t bring my 8 pound, clean dog on my shoulder to get a coffee to go without having some ridiculous law spouted at me from Jabba the Jaundiced?

The LAW must GO!

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