LitQuake has been rough. You’ve been dashing out of work, shoving people away from their cabs to make it to the Chuck Klosterman event and sprinting after buses to catch Karen Russell; you’ve had to make the hard decision between “Kafkaesque” and “Rock Out with your Book Out;” and all the while, you keep thinking Jeffrey Eugenides has just passed you on the street. With LitCrawl coming up Sat/15, things become even more overwhelming and terrific. In the Mission, bars, cafes, and bookstores together host 450 readers in 79 readings, all free and open to the public. One way to navigate the event might be to pick your favorite bar or cafe, find a chair, order a drink and wait for something to happen. Or, you can check these readings out:
 
I Live Here: SF. How We Got Here, Why We Stay
Not a lot of us can say we were born and raised in San Francisco. Most of us fled here from elsewhere for one reason or another: failed relationships, parents kicked you out, a nervous breakdown, a mid-life crisis, you formed an indie-rock band. Maybe you came for LoveFest and simply forgot whom you were. There are a thousand reasons for arriving and a thousand more for staying. In Clarion Alley, writers and non-writers alike including Mark Bittner and M.C. Mars talk about what brought them here and why they haven’t budged. 6 p.m., Clarion Alley, between Mission and Valencia, and 17th and 18th Sts, SF

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Check out more coverage of the 10th San Francisco Documentary Film Festival in this week's Guardian.

Beaverbrook (Matthew Callahan, U.S., 2010) If you attended Camp Beaverbrook, which operated in California's Lake County from 1961-85, this film is required viewing. It offers an intensely wistful look at an old-fashioned sleepaway camp that thrived in an era before insurance companies started frowning on things like helmet-free kids galloping wildly on horseback. If you don't have Beaverbrook in your blood, however, watching 1979's Meatballs will offer a similar overdose of nostalgia, plus the huge added bonus of Bill Murray. Sun/16, 5 p.m. and Oct. 18, 7:15 p.m., Roxie; Fri/14, 7:15 p.m., Shattuck.

Heavy Metal Picnic (Jeff Krulik, U.S., 2010) Everyone's seen Heavy Metal Parking Lot, the 1986 Jeff Krulik and John Heyn short that became a pre-internet cult classic. Shot amid the beer-y, mullet-y, "party-as-a-verb" shenanigans that transpired before a Judas Priest-Dokken show, Parking Lot is a seminal document for metalheads and anthropologists alike. Twenty-five years later, the prolific Krulik, again with Hayn, returns to the subject matter that made him famous with Heavy Metal Picnic, a 666 ... er, 66-minute look at an notorious 1985 concert known as "The Full Moon Jamboree" — described as a "heavy metal Woodstock" by the nervous local press at the time. Basically, this is Parking Lot shifted to the Maryland woods; there's a concert going on in the background (the bigger acts were Pentagram and the Obsessed, but there's hardly any footage of them; local boys Asylum and show organizer Billy Gordon of Blue Rockers are prominently featured, however) but the main attraction is, as ever, the fans assembled for raucous raging.

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The avant-garde publisher New Directions was founded in 1936, but the idea was borne two years earlier when Ezra Pound gave some fairly harsh advice to James Laughlin, a 22-year-old aspiring poet and Harvard undergrad. In 1934, Laughlin was ambitious enough to travel to Rapallo, Italy, to meet and study under Pound, who was by that time a fascist and outspoken anti-Semite, but still respected by young writers as the force behind Eliot, Joyce, and Hemingway, as well as Imagism, the movement he helped shape. After two months, though, Pound didn’t think Laughlin possessed enough talent, and told him to return to the states and “do something useful.”
 
Three quarters of a century later, “useful” hardly describes New Directions (which will be celebrated Tues/11 at City Lights Books) and its dedication to publishing eccentric and groundbreaking work, beginning with the likes of Dylan Thomas, Denise Levertov, Tennessee Williams, and Marianne Moore, and continuing today with contemporaries like László Krasznahorkai and Javier Marías.

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Cosmic San Francisco mainstays Audium and Planet Booty shoot us to the moon.

Some only-in-San-Francisco adventures are subtler than others -- they're you-have-to-know-they’re-there treasures, unencumbered by a surfeit of fanfare or weight of fickle expectation.

Audium, a continually-morphing collaboration in sound design between composer Stan Shaff and electronics “architect” Douglas McEachern, definitely counts as one of these.

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"I once split my pants photographing a Finnish spitz on the cliffs above Sutro Baths," the lovely, energetic Kira Stackhouse laughed over drinks at Blackbird Bar in the Castro last week. She was recounting some very interesting stories about her ambitious Project Dog -- an attempt to meticulously photograph woofy representatives of all 170 official American Kennel Club registered breeds next to purebred counterparts from dog rescue agencies.

"A big part of my mission is to photograph as many of these dogs as I can in iconic San Francisco and Bay Area settings, sometimes I'm trying to shoot five or six dogs a day. It's not like I travel around with a change of clothes --but apparently there's no lengths I won't go to! So I just tried to hold my legs together until I got the shot."

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