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.
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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.

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.

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!

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.

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.)

Omar Vizquel, the magically graceful shortstop employed by the Giants for the last four seasons, has turned his last double play for the team, General Manager Brian Sabean said in an extensive interview Monday with reporters. Asked about the future of the 41-year-old eleven-time Gold Glove winner, Sabean said the chances of Vizquel returning to the team were “zero.”

Vizquel’s last at-bat in Sunday’s final game was a satisfying slap hit, raising his career total to 2,657. The rennaissance man and well-known dandy — who also dances, sings, and paints — broke the record this year for most games ever played at the shortstop position, finishing with 2,680.

The Giants are transitioning to a more youthful team, moving from 2006, when they had the oldest lineup in the league, to this year when they had 18 rookies make their major league debut with the team, including 23-year-old Emmanuel Burriss, who is slated to take over Vizquel’s position.

Vizquel will be fondly remembered by Giants fans, who gave him a long standing ovation and curtain call Sunday when he was removed from the game after taking the field in the top of the fifth inning. He is even more revered in Cleveland, where he played eleven seasons, leading the Indians to a World Series championship. When the Giants played the Indians there this year, it was Vizquel’s first return in another uniform, and he was given a highlight tribute and several long ovations.

Vizquel has said he wants to continue playing — if not in the U.S. next year, perhaps in Japan.