--It's Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas's 100th anniversary this year! They're celebrating around the world, and San Francisco's contribution is a staged reading of Stein's last book (Brewsie and Willie) and Toklas's first (The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook). $12, 7 p.m., at the Jewish Community Center, 3200 California (x Presidio). --As part of this month's Queer Arts Festival, the LGBT Community Center presents "Are You There God? It's Me, Ben McCoy" (brilliant title), a......

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. ...