For most of us, the inside of a jail or prison is a mythical, albeit unpleasant, holding ground for those deemed by the state unfit to coexist with the rest of society. What we never really know is what it's like to be inside: strip searches, gang fights, overcrowding to the point of suffocation -- that is, until local author Charles Shaw's Exile Nation: Drugs, Prisons, Politics, and Spirituality, which is released this week. The memoir tells the gruesome story of an inmate at Cook County Jail in Chicago -- a vast facility that holds nearly 10,000 inmates and has been home to figures such as mobster Al Capone and serial killer John Wayne Gacy.

Shaw was convicted of possessing MDMA -- you might know it as ecstasy (and even after his third arrest, Shaw continues to think of it that way) -- and spent a year in the facility. Much of the book retells his experience from inside the walls of the jail, but the self-proclaimed drug activist does frequently plead his case to the reader -- that he was using ecstasy not recreationally, but as treatment for his post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by cocaine addiction.

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Howard Chaykin and Steve Leialoha

In the ever-expanding supernova of subsidiary content in the Star Wars universe (action figures, Lego sets, video games, novels, TV movies, cartoons, and theme park rides), comic books hold a special place. One reason is because the first of Marvel's six-issue comic adaptation of the original film hit stands just a month after the movie was released.

Marvel made a good bet on Star Wars. The 107-issue series continued for nearly 10 years. Despite pauses to adapt the stories of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, most issues contained original stories -- the first body of derivative Star Wars story material ever released.

Two key contributors to the early days of this run, penciller Howard Chaykin and inker Steve Leialoha, appear tonight at the Cartoon Art Museum for the event Celebrating 35 Years of Star Wars Comic Books to mark the 35th anniversary of the first issue's release.

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Look at them go!

In 1990, Kevin Bacon put on a dazzling performance in Tremors, a film about mutant worms and trailer parks. As children, we played a game in which, side by side with Kevin Bacon, we would destroy the underground monsters and bring peace to the world. Each kid carried out the appointed duties with great seriousness -- for us it was not only a game, it was making Mr. Bacon proud and protecting mom and dad from harm.

Whether it's starring in Tremors or claiming the principal is a sea monster, one thing is for sure -- children are capable of creating outlandish and spectacular worlds. Aiming to illustrate this potential while building literacy skills with inner-city kids, StageWrite presents "Short Plays by Short People: Rotten Lunches & Bubblegum Punches" on Friday at Brava Theater Center.

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Lenore Kandel

Lenore Kandel was explosive -- she was the only woman to give a speech at the 1967 Human Be-In, became immortalized by Jack Kerouac in Big Sur, and just like her buddy Allen Ginsberg, had a pamphlet of her work seized by police because of its extreme erotic content. Did we mention she was also an excellent belly dancer? Kandel was an important female voice in the predominantly male Beat movement and an activist during the counterculture San Francisco of the 1960s. Her most controversial work, The Love Book, explores female sexuality and gave voice to a generation of repressed women.

Although she has since passed, a tribute to Kandel's life is celebrated with a new release, Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel on Thursday (May 10), at the Beat Museum.

The book features previously unpublished poetry as well as some of Kandel's more iconic works, such as "To Fuck with Love," a descriptive and provocative take on a woman's sexual experience and desire. The tribute also includes a reading from Peter Coyote -- founder of the Diggers, an anarchist theater group notable for providing food, housing, transportation, and medical supplies to the influx of runaways living in Haight Ashbury in the 1960s and '70s.

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Annie Paladino

The cast of Tenderloin

Mark Ellinger spent six years living on the streets, addicted to heroin. When he shot some bad dope and ended up in the hospital for two and a half months, he resolved that things would be different when he got out.

"It was a decision I made that whatever door opens, I was going to walk through it," he said. "That was my modus operandi, and it worked. "

The door that opened was getting a digital camera from a neighbor who didn't want it anymore. Ellinger, who had studied at the S.F. Art Institute when he moved here from Ohio, lived in a single room occupancy hotel in the Tenderloin. When he returned from the hospital, he started taking pictures of the neighborhood, particularly the Beaux Arts architecture .

"The perspective that I started working on and continue working from is to look past the veneer of crime and decay," he said. "Look up, actually. Look up above the street level, because that's where you'll see the architect's original intent."

Ellinger started a blog, Up from the Deep. http://upfromthedeep.com/ This is how director and writer Annie Elias found him when she sought people to interview for a documentary play for the Cutting Ball Theater, about the neighborhood where it resides -- the Tenderloin.

The result, Tenderloin, has its opening tonight (Friday) at Exit on Taylor.

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The sugary face of evil: Blinky Winky

Any overeducated, Prius-driving, lefty cultural elitist worth her|his|its daily $10 coffee drink knows that America spent eight catastrophic years in the grip of a wicked puppet named W. The privileged faux-Texan flaunted his village idiocy, not caring whether people knew his strings were really pulled by Dick Cheney, the real-life Mr. Burns. We're here to tell you, fellow San Franciscans, that another wicked puppet is racing toward the White House, and he comes from our own ranks. His name is Blinky Winky. This puppet -- sorry, marionette -- stands about 2 feet high and looks like something from a Stephen King nightmare, his icy stare a disturbing, multicolored mixture of menace and uncaring. He holds a presidential fundraiser tonight (Monday) at El Rio.

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Photos by Erin Browner

The cast of Killing My Lobster Chops Down the Family Tree.

San Francisco sketch comedy group Killing My Lobster turns 15 this year, and to celebrate, it launches a frontal assault on the idea of family. Killing My Lobster Chops Down the Family Tree opens tonight (Thursday, April 26) at The Jewish Theatre. Director Rana Weber's cultural jabs focus on dissecting families in a progressive society. "There's gay families and straight families, and families with no limbs," she says. The troupe has taken multiple punches at San Francisco's quirks and flaws, and many (OK, some) locals are OK laughing at themselves. The troupe's video "The Coffee Wars" turned the microbrewing trend into a History Channel-esque episode on war between loyalists of different coffeehouses. Another Killing My Lobster viral video presents spending a free day in the city as a Twilight Zone episode -- "Why Is Everybody Here?"

The Exhibitionist sat down with Killing My Lobster's creative director, Andy Alabran, to hear about the hilarity of the troupe's latest show, its plans to buy its own home, and hosting a very merry Quinceanera.

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Who knew? A periodical called Sexoogy from the 1930s.

Are you afraid that people are judging your paltry, boring home library? You know those barren shelves need more of everything: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, magazines, and periodicals. But where can you find replenishments, volumes that might be rare and maybe even a little racy? Saturday marks the first Library Spring Smut Sale at the Center for Sex & Culture.

If you think the offerings consists of cast-offs, the likes of which you spot haphazardly displayed on someone's front steps or outside a BART station entrance, you're mistaken. The center's library boasts an impressive collection of mostly donated materials, and it seeks to maintain items shunned by traditional booksellers, libraries, and museums. Saturday you have the chance to look through items it chooses to sell.

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John Waters

John Waters' reputation precedes him -- and we bet that gives him no end of glee. The Baltimore native featured the plentiful drag queen Divine in many of his early features, and he took on topics such as baby farms, an adult who lives in a playpen, and a competition between two people to be the most disgusting human on the planet. Waters makes San Francisco his home -- at least part time. He calls his residence in the city "the apartment that Hairspray bought me," referring to one of his biggest commercial successes.

Waters appears tonight (Wednesday, April 25) at the California College of the Arts, screening his 2004 film A Dirty Shame and answering audience questions afterward. We spoke with him several days ago about censorship, bad taste, and what he likes about San Francisco.

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San Francisco Film Society

Alps

A great thing about film festivals is seeing films before their wider release, and in new and intimate settings. Over the weekend we screened Giorgos Lanthimos' film Alps, the follow-up to the strange yet much-loved Dogtooth, in the San Francisco Film Society's New People Cinema. The film turned out to be a perfectly bizarre and endearing study on authenticity, control, and groupthink. It's final screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival is tonight (Tuesday) at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas.

A little background for setup: I once had a business idea to be what I called a conversationist for hire. My dad thought it sounded like prostitution. In Alps, the main characters perform an equally questionable service, though much more extreme and terrifically morbid: They temporarily stand in for deceased loved ones through carefully practiced re-enactments as a paid service for the grieving. Mont Blanc, the ringleader who named the group as something irreplaceable and unidentifiable (Alps), is their pimp, and the others, strictly nicknamed and managed as smaller mountains in the range, indulge their clients' erotic fantasies to keep the dead alive, if only through menial activity and tired dialogue.

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