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......

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: LitPAC & Laughing Liberally Lab-SF Present a benefit for Slain Iraqi Comedian Walid Hassan featuring renowned writers Daniel Handler of Lemony Snicket, Andrew Sean Greer of Confessions of Max Tivoli, Michelle Tea of Valencia and Rent Girl, plus comedians, Joe Klocek, Sal Calanni of sketch group Tossing Alice, Ali Mafi of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, Samantha Chanse, Kurt Weitzmann and more. The benefit will be hosted......

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......

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......

In 1950, the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler wrote of the contemporaneous critical response to his stories and those of James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, et. al. that: 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......

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. ...

SFist loves local magazines, from Bitch to Other to Dwell. (And before all you "Wavefans" from the same IP address write in, the answer is "no".) We're so happy to welcome The Skinny, a new Bay Area publication, to the mix. According to their site "The Skinny is a quarterly guide to the San Francisco Bay Area that caters to an underserved group of residents and visitors between the ages of 18 and 34,......

Finally, our holiday film season begins. There are so many great movies opening this weekend that we don't know where to begin. On the bigger-budgeted side of things, we are embarassed by the twin riches of The House of Flying Daggers, a Tang-dynasty-set police drama with all the breathtaking martial arts we've come to expect from any movie starring the lovely Ziyi Zhang, and the film version of San Francisco novelist Daniel Handler's A Series......