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The book features previously unpublished poetry as well as some of Kandel's more iconic works, such as "To Fuck with Love," a descriptive and provocative take on a woman's sexual experience and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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Ashleigh Reddy

First place winner Nya McDowell of Richmond.

It was a huge mistake to forget to bring tissues to the Youth Speaks Teen Poetry Slam Grand Slam Finals over the weekend at Nob Hill Masonic Auditorium. Expectations of being dazzled by the stunning wordplay and vocal deliveries made by the finalists were more than met, the sentiment echoed by snaps ricocheting throughout the building.

Unforeseeable, however, was how moving and gut-wrenchingly honest the overwhelming majority of the poems would be, as kids around age 16 revealed unimaginable personal stories of conflict and violence. Of the 13 competing, five will advance to the 15th Annual Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival on July 17-21.

The students' unflinching presentations embodied the motto of the spoken word education nonprofit: "Because the next generation can speak for itself."

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Charlie Jane Anders

The big thing you need to know about the monthly series Writers with Drinks is this: Arrive super early, maybe even an hour before, for your chance at a stool or a booth. The Make Out Room is a pretty big space, but Saturday's installment still felt packed to a fire-hazard-y degree.

For good reason! As organized by Charlie Jane Anders, a writer and science-fiction nerd, five authors brought all the literary cred you'd want. With or without drinks, they read their work while most of the audience stood (and many others sprawled on the floor). Some were making out!

Overall, the evening's tone was a grab bag of comic-book geekery (Los Angeles' Sarah Kuhn), memories of a precocious childhood (local Glen David Gold), plain old storytelling (L.A.'s Amber Benson, who, from her three-season stretch acting on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, boasts a platinum-clad geek quotient), semi-erotic fiction (San Francisco's Malinda Lo), and fully erotic fiction (New York's Rachel Kramer Bussel).

A sex writer by profession, Bussel read her harrowing story of a woman who loves getting smacked by her lover. When the two end up doing it in an alley, one's panty-less-ness is revealed; things get drippy; Handi Wipes are proffered, "because she was a top who came prepared."

Whoa.

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"Galloping around the cosmos is a game for the young."

So quipped Captain Kirk to Dr. McCoy in The Wrath of Khan, and despite the fact that he turns 81 this month (looking better than many men 20 years younger), William Shatner has hardly taken that advice to heart. He's on a national tour with his one-man show, Shatner's World, which stops at the Orpheum Theatre for one show Sunday.

I think we know what to expect here: Captain Kirk making fun of his Kirk-ness, ribbing his later role as T.J. Hooker, all while congratulating himself on the towering edifice that is his life, work, and ability to laugh at himself. The video clips of Shatner's World available on its website display the master of the humblebrag in action.

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​Stories are powerful. No other medium has the ability to move, inspire, or change us quite like a well-crafted narrative. Never has this been more true than the world of sex, where fear, shame, and misinformation abound. This is all a high-minded and roundabout way of telling you to check out Wednesday's edition of Bawdy Storytelling, a rousing and arousing night of true sex stories that promises to make you laugh, make you think, and make you hard ... pressed to find a more interesting thing to do on a Wednesday night. More >>

Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Hirschman

It's hard to think of any living person more representative of the spirit of San Francisco than Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This is the man who co-founded City Lights as a bookstore as well as a publishing house, who stood trial on obscenity charges after Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" was confiscated by the police, and who has published books by poets and writers from around the world. Those include works by Diane diPrima, William S. Burroughs, Gary Snyder, and Howard Zinn. A vital poet himself, Ferlinghetti served as San Francisco's poet laureate from 1998 to 2000 and has his seen his influential 1958 collection A Coney Island of the Mind sell a mind-boggling 1 million copies in a dozen languages. At 92 he's still writing and publishing, and Friday you can hear him debut his new poem "At Sea" in person at Meridian Gallery.

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Shelley Eades

During the run of Litquake, there's sometimes a tendency (never by us!) to be timid in the early offerings, babying the reserves of literary interest for the madness of the fest's closing night, Lit Crawl. Here's a tip: Fear Lit Crawl. You should go, of course, because Lit Crawl is an alternate universe in which writers are treated like rock stars by everybody in the city. But understand that you will be jostled and confused and spun around, and much of the literature will occur on the other side of a tall man's shoulder, sometimes with you standing on the sidewalk, hearing nothing but traffic and seeing nothing but cable knit. During Litquake's run, however, you can stroll into many of the more than 100 events like royalty, especially those that offer the miracle of advance ticketing.

But don't get cocky.

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On Thursday night at the Makeout Room, Sadie Smythe will share with San Franciscans the story of her first ever orgasm. SFWeekly thought maybe we should get to know her a little bit better first.

The former Alameda resident and current Austin-based blogger at sadiesopenmarriage.com brings BedPost Confessions, her excellent erotic readings series and podcast, to San Francisco for the first time, and she's hoping to lay locals' kink cards on the table too.

Have you always been so open about talking about your own sex life?
Nooo! Not at all. I once thought of myself as kind of a prude.

What changed?
I think as we age, we become more comfortable with our sexuality. When I opened my marriage five years ago, I discovered a whole new aspect of my sexuality. I'd come home after having these experiences with men and women and tell my husband about them all (and I say all, I don't mean I was out everyday, screwing around, but every couple of weeks or so).

He was so entertained that he encouraged me to start blogging. And when I did, I really started looking at my sexuality and talking about it out loud, that's how I came to open up.

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Julia O. Test

Ouchy the Clown and Dixie De La Tour

"We've all done some fucked-up shit," says Dixie De La Tour: going home with the wrong person, getting in over our heads in a BDSM scenario, sitting through that timeless, endless feature Nightmare Date II: The Boundary-Free Zone. We've all also been blown away by indoor fireworks -- using muscles we didn't know we had, discovering mysterious bruises, and waking up too stunned to do anything but whisper "God almighty" to the hottie (or hotties) next to us.

Good or bad, these experiences can make for great stories, says De La Tour, hostess of Bawdy Storytelling, the next installment of which happens Wednesday at the Blue Macaw. Several years ago De La Tour began organizing small groups of like-minded friends (okay, pervs) to share their tales of debauchery. These lusty confessionals became such a hit that she took them public, adding themes -- such as this round's "Candy from Strangers" -- and featuring different speakers.

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Christopher Lozano

Tahminah Zaman demonstrates Egyptian dance before reading poetry at Sacred Grounds.

MFA programs are worthless. The whole thing is just a pyramid scheme that produces nothing more visceral than occasional paper cuts. At least that's what some people say. But a group of Bay Area MFA students is meeting up after school to share work with one another. The result is Writing Without Walls, a new monthly submission-based reading series formed by people in programs at USF, California College of the Arts, and Mills College. They seem oblivious or indifferent to the aforementioned charges. Each of their shows is themed and takes place at a different venue.

The second show, "It's Yer Birthday," was at Sacred Grounds over the weekend. To make the most of that notorious space at the edge of Golden Gate Park, founders and hosts Rey-Phil Genaldo (USF), Gina Goldblatt (Mills), and Jeff Von Ward (CCA) removed all tables and chairs and induced a floor seating only policy. When I walked in early, the three were taping blankets to the floor. It happened to be Genaldo's birthday, and to his surprise, Von Ward brought a giant cake. But it turned out there was more than one reason to celebrate.

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