You might be weary of the typical young memoirist who suffers some unimaginable hardship, like a high-level internship, only to lose it all, gain a publisher and a development deal, and sail into microfame. Nonetheless, we're quivering: The Girl's Guide to Homelessness is a very good book. To write it, Brianna Karp, who appears Wednesday at Book Passage, first went through the homelessness mentioned in the title. In her case, last-resort lodging took the form of a travel trailer in a Walmart parking lot, where the 24-year-old lived after losing her executive assistant job and running out of money.
Critics are toasting the film, bloggers are debating whether it's geek-bait or something more, and we're just flat-out eager to be sitting beneath the Castro's glorious big screen, where for two hours we'll most likely be the embodiments of these famous filmmakers' most reliable habits: people who gaze upward and gape, as Spielberg heroes tend to do, at things that start off awesome but over the long haul disappoint, like Abrams' Alias, Cloverfield, and Lost all did. (We hope his Alcatraz won't.)
To score your free tix, you need to visit a special site and enter a special secret code word:
San Francisco produces such a wealth of so-called outsider art, you could quickly lose interest in who the hell the insiders are. Tomorrow's opening reception for "As We Live It" features participants in our great city's assistance programs, including housing, mental health, and substance abuse treatment.
Here's one man and woman's minute-by-minute review, presented here because we ain't 'fraid of no hardcore - not even of the slick and overproduced variety where the women's flesh is slick and orange-tinged and plasticky, like American cheese slices still in the wrappers.
00:15: Like the real Ghostbusters (but not the cartoon The Real Ghostbusters), This Ain't Ghostbusters opens at the New York Public Library, where an offscreen ghost startles an elderly librarian, but this time that elderly librarian is played by Ron Jeremy.
Alan: The real question is will it be better than Ghostbusters II?
Amy: And which one has more slime?
Litzenberg and Stuart, both 25 and graduates of Loyola Marymount University's School of Film and Television in Los Angeles, did what film students do after college: get an apartment and make home videos. Three years and 20-odd videos later, they're still in it for the love of the craft, because Lucas remains the only one cashing in. Regardless, their viewership is increasing thanks to a presence on the humor site Funny or Die, and with this latest video, they've taken on an empire. May the force be with them.
How did Slick Gigolo come about?
Bridge Stuart: I did some comedy web stuff before. We were thinking, "Why don't we do our own videos?" We started with a little video, "Cookin' Time!" We were still working out the kinks and we lost all of the original sound. It just evolved from there.
Mike Litzenberg: We wanted to see what we could do and became more and more ambitious.
BS: The big thing that's helped us along was our third video, "We Are Douchebags." It went viral a year and a half ago. It gave us confidence.
