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.

I actually learned to ride first, in that school. The teacher you see at the beginning, he taught me how to ride. But I knew about the school from the beginning. It’s right next to all the stables in Chantilly. At first, I didn’t know we were going to focus on the school. We knew we were going to do something in the school, but at the beginning I thought we were just going to follow a kid, briefly, at the beginning, then a guy at the end of his career: a lad and a jockey. Finally it ended up that the relationships with the kids were really great, and I understood that it had a big potential, movie wise. And so, little by little, I really started focusing on the kids.

How did you make the decision to focus on these three kids in particular?
The first decision was to choose a class, so I chose the youngest class. It’s a school you enter when you’re 14 or 15 years old, and those in the youngest class were all brand-new to the industry. So that was the first choice. And then I spent lots of time with them. Then in October, like a month after they started school, I selected ten, fifteen kids who seemed interesting, and I interviewed them. And very soon I knew those three were going to be the characters, for different reasons:

Flavien, the one who rides the race at the end, he had this really tiny kid voice, and I don’t know why, but he suddenly started talking about death, about God, about — nothing to do with horses! — about his parents, about, “does death hurt?” Stuff like that. so I said, ok — he’s going to be interesting.

Steve, the redhead, he is in a complete different world. Lots of poetry, he doesn’t know it, but I loved it. I don’t know how they did it, I didn’t read the translations, but his French is really completely mixed up, and he has that very strong northern accent also, as in Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis [which is playing Sunday at 1:15]. He’s from that same northern part of France.

And Florian, the last one, he’s like a bullet. He knows where he wants to go, and he goes straight towards it.

So that’s how I ended up choosing them. Each one is very different, and they all correspond to what I could be, used to be, wanted to be — like Flavien, I was this really romantic kid, still loving mom a lot, that was me at one time. Like Steve, I could also be completely in a world of my own, and I could also be like Florian and just do things without asking why, and just go straight ahead knowing what I want and what road to take.

I have to say that even though Flavien was the one who rode in the race at the end, Florian really impressed me with how he internalized a highly professional attitude. When criticized, he would curse under his breath, and then he would do the job again.
Exactly. I had a talk with him one day, I asked him, “how do you feel you learn? I have the feeling you just observe a lot.” I have 220 hours of footage, and in that footage I could see him doing exactly the same movements, especially with the broom, as his trainer. He moves his body in exactly the same way. He just observes a lot and does the exact same thing. And he really feels that he’s a professional already. Even though he didn’t ride in the race at the end, he is the one who really has a chance to become a jockey. And he had his first race just two months ago. Because his trainer is a really professional high-society guy, step by step.

It really impressed me how all the jockeys, especially Florian’s jockey, instilled discipline and respect in the boys: not as an end in itself, but because the horses deserve respect. Everything is about the horses. One of them says, “talk to your horse, it’s not a tractor.” Well, we know that these boys rose to the challenge, but how did others do? Were there kids who dropped out?
The year I was there, everybody told me that in winter, half the class is going to stop. And it ended up that the winter was quite warm, or at least not really, really cold like it could be, and finally only one stopped at the end of the year, not even in the winter. But statistically, about half of the kids who enter the school stop, because it is really exhausting. They’re up at 5 in the morning, and in the winter it could be raining, snowing, doesn’t matter. They’re outside at 6 in the morning in winter, and 5:30 in summer.

You mentioned that you studied anthropology in school; would you say you took an anthropologist’s approach in making this film?
Yes, and I think that’s how documentary should be done. Two things in documentary films make me a bit angry: first, the voice-over, which tells you what to think. A dog passes by, the voice-over will say “a dog passes by.” And second, there’s the fact that documentary filmmakers often “steal” their images. I don’t believe you can spend only three weeks with one person, or an industry, or in a society, in any group, anything, and understand what’s going on. I think you have to spend a lot of time, and either be able to do what they’re doing, or at least try and show that you’re trying to understand. And that’s what works. This industry, this culture, it’s a very closed culture. Besides horses nothing else matters. It was very tiring for me because you couldn’t talk about anything but horses. I mean, nobody even cared about soccer. So first of all it’s very difficult to be accepted, but by the time they understood that I was going to be here for a year, that I’m doing a feature movie and not something for television, and then a lot of showing that I’m involved — I learned to ride a horse, I was in the stables at 5 in the morning when it’s still night, helping to sweep and rake when I have nothing to do, instead of putting my hands in my pockets. And so little by little, I got integrated, they came to trust me. and from there on, they gave me everything. Here what I’m talking about is being accepted by the adults’ world. With the kids, it was easy for me to be 14 years old.

As I watched the film, I was squirming almost the whole time because I was remembering my own adolescence.
Of course. And that was really important to me, to show them as real adolescents, becoming adults without seeing it. Pretending to be adults, but back in the room you still get into fights and stuff, and talk about girls and wrestling.

That reminds me. This seems to be a very masculine world, and I didn’t see very many girls in the film. Were there any girls involved in the training?
Here’s the thing. Sixty percent of the school is girls, but it still a world dominated by this very masculine ideology, this macho thing. Girls have to be really tough to be there. As to why I didn’t shoot with the girls is that the intimacy I could get with the boys, I couldn’t get with the girls. Because they were, you know, 15, 16, I couldn’t live with them as much as I could with the boys, and they weren’t as open with me. If I had to redo the film, I would probably take a female director with me. That was access I couldn’t get.

Lydia Fong

Opening at Gallery 16

[Images by the galleries named above; please click on them to visit their websites!] ]]> http://sf.metblogs.com/2008/10/08/galleries-lydia-fong-gallery-16/feed/ http://sf.metblogs.com/2008/10/07/film-french-cinema-now/ http://sf.metblogs.com/2008/10/07/film-french-cinema-now/#comments Wed, 08 Oct 2008 03:06:43 +0000 Jeremy Hatch http://sf.metblogs.com/?p=4617 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 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!

• Opening night is always good, and the ticket price helps to fund the festival. But get your tix in advance, because they will sell out.
• The weekend mostly consists of free readings at Main Library, downstairs in Koret Auditorium. Last year I stayed all day long, both days, popping in and out as my whims dictated.
• On Saturday night there is a ticketed reading hosted by the Grotto called Intimacy: “a multimedia extravaganza of tight genes, body fluids, and misplaced affections.”
• On Sunday afternoon there is a ticketed event that should be very, very popular: an afternoon at the Kabuki with Neil Gaiman. The $28 admission includes a signed, 1st edition copy of The Graveyard Book. You read about it here. For tickets call the sponsor of the event, The Booksmith, at (415) 863-8688.
• On Monday night, make it if you can to Opium’s Literary Death Match at the Rickshaw Stop. Advance tickets are also recommended for this event.
• Tuesday has an event that’s easy to overlook: Lit & Lunch, “San Francisco’s first and only reading series to focus on international literature and translation, featuring prominent poets, authors, and translators reading and discussing their work.” This one will run from 12:30 to 1:30 at 111 Minna. (As a bonus, the show on the walls, works by Henry Lewis and Keli Reule, just opened last night.)
• Wednesday night features another reading in a gallery: Either/Or, hosted by Varnish. Litquake “asked six authors to conjure, write, and then read short stories on the theme of ‘Either/Or.’ All stories were written especially for the event and will be read in public for the first time.” The equivalent event last year was great.
• Thursday night features an evening of Steampunk: “Litquake presents an evening celebrating all aspects of Steampunk - impossibly fantastic adventures you’ll never forget. Steampunk is Victorian elegance paired with modern technology: steam-driven robots, souped-up stagecoaches, and space-faring dirigibles, all fueled by gaslight, romance, mad scientists, and oh-so-trim waistcoats. Lounge and doors open at 7 pm; readings followed by Q&A moderated by author Terry Bisson.” This will be in the Variety Preview Room in the Hobart Building (Market at Montgomery).
• And of course, on Saturday the 11th, the Litcrawl. Don’t miss it.

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!

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.)

Readers tomorrow will include Tamim Ansary, Justin Chin, Jane Ganahl, Leah Garchik, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, Jewelle Gomez, Kemble Scott, April Sinclair (April Sinclair!), Kevin Smokler, K.M. Soehnlein, and it will be moderated by Jack Hirschman. What a lineup!

It turns out that the last week of September is Banned Book Week. (Amusingly, the press release from the library refers to it once as BBW; somebody should tell them the acronym is spoken for.) Observance of Banned Book Week, which is sponsored by every national book- and library-related organization, is meant to “remind Americans not to take this precious democratic freedom [the freedom to read] for granted,” according to the press release. It goes on: “Banned Books Week celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. Intellectual freedom can exist only where these two essential conditions are met.”

Well, the 44th annual Big Book Sale hosted by the Friends of the Public Library started yesterday, but have no fear — the sale will continue today and tomorrow from 10 to 8, and on Sunday from 10 to 6. All books on Sunday will be priced down to $1 or less! The Friends contend that it’s the largest book sale on the West Coast, and I’d believe it. It’s being held, as usual, at lovely Fort Mason, in the Festival Pavillion. Just go to Fort Mason — you can’t miss it!

This sale is truly staggering, by the way. The picture above is of last year’s sale, and it nicely conveys the scope. (It comes from this great post on the anonymous blog, Tea & Cookies.) You could easily pick up a year’s reading for less than $50. Normally I’m such a restrained person in bookstores: because of the relatively high cost of new books, I almost never purchase one unless I’m certain I will benefit from it. Fifteen bucks per paperback adds up, never mind hardcovers! But at library book sales, all prudence goes out the window. Not only are the books cheap, but according to the Friends page, all the proceeds “fund education programs that promote literacy for children, teens and adults. Last year, over $250,000 was raised for San Francisco’s libraries.” How can you resist that? It’s a license to splurge. Last year my wife and I took public transportation specifically to limit the amount we could bring home, and we still ended up staggering up the big hill to our house with a huge bag stuffed with books. But it was worth it, I think. I’d be more certain of that if I could still remember what we bought.