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.

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Litquake, the biggest literary festival in San Francisco, kicks off tonight at the Herbst Theater with Suckered: Writers Confess a Profound Lack of Judgment, and ends on Saturday the 11th in the Mission District with the famous (perhaps by now infamous) Litcrawl. In between there is a whole week of great events, most of them low-cost or free. As author and participant Kemble Scott writes in the newsletter he devoted to the festival:

Litquake couldn’t come at a better time. While recent news headlines have many of us worried about our pocketbooks, most Litquake events are absolutely free. The handful of ticketed programs helps fund the entire festival. The Bay Area’s unique egalitarian spirit fuels this massive literary machine: it’s run by volunteers, and all of the authors have donated their time. Amazing, isn’t it?

The challenge for you is figuring out which events to attend.

Scott suggests that we print out the entire festival schedule and “think of it as a restaurant menu. An appetizer of Dennis Lehane, Beth Lisick for the main course, a side of Jane Ganahl, and for dessert…”

My personal faves and highlights are after the jump. Have fun, and see you there!

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Last Saturday, Dolores Park was home to the 9th Annual Expo for Independent Arts; this Saturday, the park will be home to an event for those more interested in art-as-performance than art-as-object. It’s Improv Everywhere’s Mp3 Experiment San Francisco. Beginning at 2:00 and running no later than 2:45, a huge crowd of people will converge on the park and follow instructions given by the voice in their heads.

Best of all, you can be one of them!

See the page for detailed instructions, but here’s how it basically works: you download an mp3 to your mp3 player and sync up your watch to their page before leaving for the event. At the appointed time and place you press “play,” and follow the instructions along with everybody else. Some videos of past events can be viewed here.

Improv Everywhere has a note about cameras: This is a participatory event. We encourage participants to leave their cameras at home and have fun participating. Same goes for the media. Let’s all enjoy the moment and resist the urge to document! That makes perfect sense for the participants, but the media? Sorry folks, but knowing journalists, that’s the exact kind of request that will guarantee the presence of at least one camera crew. Of course, maybe that’s what Improv Everywhere wants. They are rather devious folks, after all!

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The New York Times today began a Road To November series of mood-testing with voters across the country, beginning their survey in San Francisco, where “It’s frustrating to live in a city where everyone assumes that because you share airspace you also share political views,” according to the quantifiably named Joel Muchmore.

Among the slightly arresting details of life in the city discovered by the Times’ reporter are the “Ferry Terminal Market” — she means the Ferry Building Marketplace — and “last Sunday’s ‘leather/fetish’ street fair,” that is, the Folsom Street Fair. She cites the city’s universal health care initiative and the ban on plastic bags, though she fails to point out the ban applies only to markets and pharmacies.

But one bit of controversial public policy she missed completely is the ban on sales of tobacco products at pharmacies, which went into effect today. I just visited a Walgreens, and the cigarette display case was as bare as a Trick-or-Treater’s bag on Election Day.

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Earlier this afternoon I walked past 826 Valencia and saw a notice for this cool, typically whimsical event posted in the window:

Join artist Lucas Murgida as he completes a three-year traveling art project which began here in the 826 front window. This installation of The Locksmithing Institute will kick off with a reception in the Pirate Store, where refreshments and a demonstration on opening doors without keys will be enjoyed by all.

In February of 2005, The Locksmithing Institute conducted its first class at 826 Valencia. Here students were taught how to liberate themselves from their everyday shackles in a series of lock-picking courses. Since that time, the Institute has traveled all over the Western Hemisphere and has taught hundreds of students in Portland, New York, Oakland, San Francisco, Baltimore, Boston, and Uruguay a host of locksmithing skills such as how to pick locks, make keys, find keys, lose keys, and how not to pick locks. Click here for more details.

On Friday, September 26, the eleventh and final lesson of The Locksmithing Institute will begin at 826 Valencia. Incoming students will be given the opportunity to test their meddle in the Institute’s mobile locking window display classroom. Tuition is free, all ages are welcome, no experience is necessary, and keys are not required.

The event will run from 6-8 PM tomorrow night, Friday 26th. Unfortunately, I’m going to be down in Santa Cruz for most of the day, but I’m going to try really hard to be back in time for this!

[Event text taken directly from 826 Valencia; another heads-up from SF Funcheap.]

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As reported by SF Weekly, the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle’s books section, Regan McMahon, has accepted a buyout and will leave the newspaper. McMahon had been books editor only a few months. She was promoted to the post when Oscar Villalon, who had helmed the section for several years, accepted a buyout in August.

According to the report, McMahon was assured by Chronicle managers that the paper would continue the 8-page tabloid section, which is now a pullout from the slightly longer Insight section of the Sunday paper. The moves come as newspapers across the country continue to hemorrhage money, with arts coverage being particularly vulnerable.

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This Saturday the 27th, the San Francisco Film Society and the Presidio Trust are co-presenting the seventh annual Film in the Fog. This year they’re screening Vincente Minnelli’s 1951 film, An American in Paris, starring Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron. It’s a free outdoor screening on the lawn at the Main Post Theater in the Presidio (99 Moraga Ave), right near where they did Shakespeare in the Park weekend before last. The screening will be preceded at 5:30 by live entertainment from Pi Clowns: The Physical Comedy Troupe, and the screening itself will start at 7:00 with a vintage cartoon and newsreel before the feature. Quoth the Presidio Trust: “Bring a blanket, low lawn chairs and picnic under the stars! Food and drink from the Presidio’s Dish Cafe and Acre Cafe will be available for purchase.” Quoth the Film Society: “As always, it gets a little chilly in the Presidio this time of year, so bring warm clothes and blankets to sit on.” Quoth me: “Brrr!” And anyway, how can you picnic under the stars when the fog is obscuring them? Well, maybe we can give them that one. After all, it might be clear out.

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Kirk Read, host of the San Francisco reading series Smack Dab and K’vetsh, has won the first award by the Open Door Project, an effort by publishing figure Don Weise to create more opportunities for gay male writers. (Publishing folks know Weise as a former editor at the Avalon Publishing Group, but before that he worked at San Francisco’s Cleis Press.) (Disclosure: Cleis Press has published two of my books.)

Read is a performance artist and HIV activist in San Francisco in addition to his author/impresario roles.

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Vive le Rock continues its run tonight at Mr. Smith’s (34 7th St) starting 8:00 PM, cover charge $7. The show will consist of music from the masterminds behind the series, Oakland’s own Gosta Berling, and the guest band will be The Sleepover Disaster from Fresno, an awesome group that has achieved a certain measure of recognition lately. The music is going to accompany a bunch of presumably funny, morbid films by Waylon Bacon, a local filmmaker who has shown at the San Francisco Underground Film Festival and The Fright Night Film Festival. Or maybe his films are going to accompany the music. Both statements are true. An event page with press release describing the series and tonight’s show in more detail is here on Yelp.

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This Saturday is Nancy Pelosi’s annual free workshop for future citizens to be delivered at a location on the edge of the Civic Center neighborhood… (I wonder if any of the notorious immigrant crack dealers with “Amnesty” who work around the corner near Hyde & Golden Gate will drop by…)
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