MUSIC: As we already mentioned, Why? is performing this evening along with Dose One, Cryptacize, DJ Odd Nosdam, DJ Jel. 8 p.m. // Great American Music Hall [859 O'Farrell] // $13 *THEATER: Eve Ensler's Obie Award-winning play the Vagina Monologues -- featuring such monologues as I Was Twelve, My Mother Slapped Me, My Angry Vagina, My Vagina Was My Village, The Little Coochie Snorcher, and more -- takes the stage in the Castro for......

LIT: Launch party for Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser's newest release, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure, which is, well, just as it sounds: six-word memoirs penned by famous and not-so-famous writers. Happens at the Rockit Room tonight. *CLUB: You know who knows how to party? Service industry workers. From chefs to bartenders to waiters to barbacks, you will find a group no finer than these people......

READING: Idiolexicon Poetry Series brings together different types of poets -- from slam to experimental, hip-hop and academia -- having them share a stage. Tonight, the lineup includes performances by poets Stephen Meads and Myron Michael, and music by Cynthia Weyuker. Happens tonight at the Boxcar Playhouse. COMEDY: Part of local sketch comedy troupe SPF7, Justin Lamb and Jay Starr perform tonight at Club Deluxe. MUSIC: One of the Innovators of the Bakersfield Sound,......

Too real, if you ask us. Election night will soon fall upon the city like a blanket of darkness. But that doesn't mean you should celebrate or grieve alone. Ripping off Inspired by SFBG's Election Night Parties, we present to you SFist's...election night parties. Ta-da. -- Gavin Newsom's (Victory) Party: Pros: at the Ferry Building, the thrill of victory, Gavin's form Cons: at some point you will be snubbed by someone in the society......

-- Carmen Jones: Based off of Georges Bizet's famous French opera Carmen, the adaptation was made into a successful Broadway musical, and then a '50s film staring Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, and Pearl Bailey. Now, see it again on stage right here in SF. The curtain goes up tonight at the African-American Art & Culture Complex (762 Fulton); $15. -- The Halloween Friday Night Skate: Rollerskate (or blade) in your Halloween costume without breaking......

-- Tastes of the City: Help raise money for the George Mark Children's House in San Leandro by attending this culinary bash. Young and "philanthropic-minded" guys and gals meet and mingle while binge eating on food and wine from such places as Andalu, Jack Falstaff, and more. Goes from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. at the Forum at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; $60. (!) -- Mathematicians, Madame Blavatsky Overdrive, and Odd Nosdam:......

If you're going to drink this Saturday, make it for a good cause! El Rio is hosting the Connecting Worlds benefit from 4-7 p.m. Jam band Chemystry Set will be playing, there's going to be photography exhibits, and all the money raised (sliding scale at the door) will go to the groups Afghans4Tomorrow (which focuses on rebuilding Afghanistan) and First Exposures (a local photography/mentoring group for students).......

-- Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox: You've bought the all-purpose soap and chortled over its packaging, now catch the documentary about the guy who started it all. Screens tonight at 7:15 p.m. 9:15 at The Red Vic, 1727 Haight; $5-8.50. -- Yo Momma! Slam: Last year's winner "Sugar" Sheng Wang hosts an insult-filled evening of cracks and cruelty directed at the mothers of some of the Bay Area's best slammers. Starts at 9 p.m. at......

-- Madcat Women's International Film Festival -- Frame by Frame: Experimental film festival's night focusing on animation, claymation, and digital shorts all directed by women. Starts at 8:30 p.m. at El Rio, 3158 Mission; $7-$20. -- "Fashion Rewind: Play It. Make It. Wear It.": Art Institute of California-San Francisco students create original fashions with the two themes in mind: recycled materials and music icons. So...we have no idea what to expect. But you will......

Who ya got? The cowboy or the samurai? That's the question posed by the Asian-American Theater Company's Cowboy v. Samurai, a story about two Asian-American cowboys in Montana who fall in love with the same Korean-American new girl in town. Our Gothamist cousins liked it when it played in New York. 2 p.m. at the Thick House (1695 18th Street, x Arkansas), $20. Other events: --The workers united -- have a whole month to celebrate!......

--It's June 16, which means it's Bloomsday! Commemorate the day made famous in James Joyce's Ulysses with readings from the book, music, and a special Bloomsday feast at the Mechanics' Institute. 57 Post Street (x Market), $15, saloon opens 6:30, readings begin at 7:30. --LAist Zach is coming to town as part of the CalArtsf alumni art festival: dance, spoken word, world music, animation, paintings, and lots more artistic expression at Cowell Theater and the......

What happens when nearly 30 local artists create works of art made entirely from reclaimed and recycled materials? Head over tonight (or sometime this month) to find out at the Market Street Gallery for ReArt: The Art of Reuse. till 5pm, 1554 Market Street,SF. More art for the month of June - local artist David Benzler had been all over the thriving Mission district art scene for the last several years. His latest work......

Pick your poison -- it's either flyering for Gavin Newsom or going to the Progressive Convention this afternoon. If politics isn't your game, here's some other options for today and tonight: --The Manga show's opened at the Asian Art Museum! Featuring the art of Astroboy! Check out the blog, and check out the show. 200 Larkin Street, $12, 10-5. --Bring a radio and come to a Southern Exposure artists' walking/radio broadcast narrative tour of 20th......

This isn't just tonight -- it's for all month -- but it's so cool we're making it the pick of the day! Bank of America customers, you can flash your ATM card or credit card and you and a guest get into a bunch of local museums for free, free, free! (Wells Fargo card holders, you'll have to pay not only admission but also a $2.50 service charge. Kidding, kidding.) Offer applies to the SFMOMA,......

Activist film in the Mission - At El Rio (3158 Mission St. at Cesar Chavez), outside on the patio, The Heads Up Collective presents The Take, an inspiring documentary, filmed during the factory takeovers in Buenos Aires, that centers around one auto-parts factory, and of the lives and struggles of the 30 unemployed workers who decide to reoccupy, collectivize, and get it going again. This screening is part of the monthly radical film series, Televising......

Last week's winner, the SF Weekly. Do you want to be a fill-in copy editor for the Weekly? First question: does fill-in need a hyphen? Also, you must know Quark. We skipped Matt Smith this week, we just weren't up for the hate. The Apologist on traffic. Can we also confess that we don't really get the Ephraim the Track Bike column, though we do love it. Advice on effective protesting. Cover article: a con......

Anything you can do, Wednesday can do better. Tonight: The APA group Kearny Street Workshop, in conjunction with Intersection for the Arts, presents the finale to its 2006 Intergenerational Writers Labwith a reading of the works that the lab participants have been preparing throughout the year. Sounds like experimental fiction, poetry, and maybe some lyrical prose might be making an appearance (though the group is careful to say that their work "transcends genre.") $5-15, 7-9......

Monday's world premiere of the locally shot and produced documentary Runners High was an exuberant and charged affair. Many of the subjects of this documentary revolving around one season with Students Run Oakland, (an athletic mentoring program that trains Oakland public high school students for the mental and physical demands of a marathon) were in the Kabuki's Theater One (Note to the SFIFF staff: what is the deal keeping the balcony closed until people......

Saturday: SFist Jackson tipped us off to the Swearing Festival starting at 7 at Edinburgh Castle. 5 hours of vulgar speech-related activity sounds like a party to us! Sunday: It's the Tour of California bike race! No, we're so not riding in it, but we're all set to watch it as it whips past us some time between 10 a.m. and 12:22 p.m. Monday: Yay! Presidents day means no (day job) work for this......

Add 15 cents more to your BART card -- Bernal Heights, Baja Noe Valley (what a name), and Upper Mission neighborhood advocates are trying to get BART to revive its 2002 plan to build a new station stop at 30th and Mission. Folks in the area say it's too hard for them to get to either 24th Street or Glen Park by foot, and that they think a new BART stop will help revive the area too. Revive the area? Any area that has Emmy's Spaghetti Shack, El Rio, Mitchell's, Zante's, and Goood Fricken Chicken is doing just fine in our books! BART officials say they'd love to do it, noting that the gap between 24th and Glen Park is the longest uninterrupted segment of the city's BART tracks (2 miles), but need to get the okay from the City before they start, and they'd need to get about 5000 riders at the station for it to be feasible. Check out the specs here (.pdfs). The new station would cost about $444 to $525 million to build. In other news, BART's also looking into whether they should build an extension to Jack London Square too. BART's getting it done! (Though hey guys, maybe you could also look into fixing that switching problem that gets SFist Jon so exercised?) Picture from SFCityscape.com...

Last week's winner, the Bay Guardian: Still angry about Hetch Hetchy! Mandatory retirements at the Chron. A shopping center at Piers 27-31? Cover article: animal research at UCSF. (two upsetting sidebars here (monkeys) and here (dogs)). Is it a good idea for autistics to mock non-autistics by calling them "neurotypical"? (This is like when the group of geeks would say "you're normal!" to the other kids in school.) Taquerias in strange places. And the Lit section, which we skipped. The SF Weekly: Yet another article about mandatory retirements at the Chron! Leaking like the New Orleans levees! Cover article: Harmon Leon terrorizes pro-abstinence people! The part where he wore the short-shorts and made suggestive comments the whole day ("mmmm, threesome") is truly brilliant. Oyster eatoff next Tuesday! Books about the 1906 earthquake. Meredith Brody waxes on and on and on about New Orleans. Take it, SFist Ced! Should you or your deaf cousin pay for the sign-language interpreter at your wedding? (Aw, hell to the no! It was not just suggested by the relatives that they just not invite the deaf cousin!) Free Bluegrass Festival this weekend. And the Bouncer reflects on the big questions of life at that bar next door to El Rio's. The East Bay Express, the Metro, and the pick of the week, after the jump....

Documentaries about San Francisco are always our favorite type of anything. So we bundled up for the outdoor screening of the Madcat Int'l Women's Film Festival's City Nights program at El Rio, which features one long documentary and five shorts about SF. Before the movies started, fest director Ariella Ben-Dov (or at least we think that's who it was -- we missed the intro) warned everyone that if it rained, we'd either need to help the techs cover up all the equipment with tarps, or at least get out of the way. But the rain never got to the lower Mission and the movies spooled out unscathed. After the jump: cemeteries, our failed yvesdropping attempt (how does SFist MattyMatt do it?), and -- hey! that's our street!...

The Madcat Women's International Film Festival continued last Wednesday night at El Rio with intermittantly interesting animated shorts in Amok-imation. Highlights: "Give AIDS the Freeze," a 1950s social hygiene film, repurposed with a scratchy overlay of messages about AIDS. Footage of a stodgy scientist entombed in an animated condom with the message "Insist that he wear one" -- cute and clever. Also good: "Small & Deep, Love Stories." High-falutin' title, but nevertheless humble and......

Starting tonight and running until September 27 in SF venues including El Rio, Artist's Television Access, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, with two additional programs at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive, Oct 6 and 13 MadCat is where it's at this week and next. MadCat is the self-described "highly acclaimed international festival that exhibits independent and experimental films and videos directed by women from around the globe. The Festival emphasizes work that is inventive......