Results tagged “danielhandler”

You have to enjoy the irony of a composer whose most widely played piece is titled The Composer Is Dead. Indeed, it's so popular that it got turned into the cutest, funnest children's book, complete with an accompanying CD. Said composer? Our own Nathaniel Stookey, a San Francisco resident who collaborated here with Lemony Snicket for the witty text. Snicket, aka. Daniel Handler, is the author of a Series of Unfortunate Events, which sold over 50 millions copies. Talk about a local dream team.

It's our turn to read the Weeklies this week, and we start with SFist Sarah L's pick of last week, the newly-re-indied East Bay Express. Congrats! The letters hate on the UC Regents. Something about racial bias in contracting, we didn't really understand it. The story behind those "nappy headed hos" t-shirts at Bear Basics. Cover article: Some well-paid lackey of "Golden Pig" Don Perata. Bless their hearts at the EBX! They've also started summarizing their articles on their blog. We like the word "NeoXican." Book reviews! Daniel Handler v. the guy who wrote that You Suck vampire book. Pho in Oakland Chinatown. I Like Eating goes to a sports bar. Aaron Axelson compares Live 105 to Moneyball. And the EBX wins some writing awards, along with EBX alum and current SF Weekly editor Will Harper. Congrats!

Our next big SFist contest is for "An Evening of a Thousand Scowls" a comedy show put on by everyone's favorite writers workshop, 826 Valencia. The night features such comedians as Janeane Garofalo, Patton Oswalt, Al Madrigal, Jasper Redd, Brent Weinbach and others, and will be hosted by non-comedian Daniel Handler (aka “Lemony Snicket”). The performance will raise money for 826 Valencia's student writing and tutoring programs.

A passel of literary events tonight:

We headed to Cafe Du Nord last Friday to catch the sold-out early show by Emily Haines and The Soft Skeleton. By the 9pm showtime, the band was still soundchecking behind closed curtains and didn't start playing to the crowd until an hour later, but it was worth the wait. Haines crouched behind the keys, bird-skinny and soft-voiced, embodying the delicate yin to her animated Metric persona's yang. Eerie old black and white film clips played in the background while she drenched the crowd with slow, forlorn song movements. This introverted version of Haines was just as intense as you'd expect her to be. Between songs she debated whether or not she should talk to the audience more, and when a woman in the crowd encouraged her to, Haines thought and then replied, "I don't feel like it." Then she let the songs speak for her.

In a shameless bit of self-reference, we will announce that it's our birthday, and we have therefore been the happy recipient of more than one Amazon gift certificate over the course of the day. We're not the kind of a**hole who complains about a gift (shut up, we're not!), but we did have a moment of crisis: how do we reconcile our sincere and public support of our fine local independent bookstores with the use of these GCs? One option is to duck the book issue and treat ourselves to that ice cream maker we've always wanted, but we know ourselves too well -- despite our best intentions it'll end up on the shelf next to our waffle maker and George Foreman grill. Then, we remembered commenter Karen, who reminded us that independent bookstore purchases can be made by choosing the "Used and New" option. Thanks, Karen, for solving our dilemma! SFist commenters are the best!

It takes a very open mind indeed to look behind the unnecessarily gaudy covers, trashy titles and barely acceptable advertisements and recognize the authentic power of a kind of writing that, even at its most mannered and artificial, made most of the fiction of the time taste like a cup of lukewarm consommé at a spinsterish tearoom.

It's almost exactly fifty years later, and it still smacks you upside your beret-wearing cool-cat bongo-beating head, man -- Allan Ginsberg debuted his classic poem "Howl" on Friday, October 7, 1955, at a jam-packed Six Gallery on Fillmore Street. His passionate reading brought tears to the eyes of the crowd, and is widely viewed as having kick-started the SF Beat Movement of the 1950s. On the actual day of (which coincidentally is also a Friday), Howl publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti's a href="http://www.citylights.com">bookstore and literary festival are sponsoring a Howl Redux, where they'll play film footage of Ginsberg himself reading Howl. Afterwards, contemporary San Francisco area writers will read the works of other revolutionary San Francisco area writers (so Daniel Handler is reading Gertrude Stein, Jerry Brown is reading Jack London, and Armistead Maupin is reading Mark Twain, among others. Pick up tickets here.

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Finally, our holiday film season begins. There are so many great movies opening this weekend that we don't know where to begin.