After Boots Riley's phantasmagoric film Sorry to Bother You opened earlier this month, the spotlight shines on Oakland for a second time. Oakland natives Rafael Casal (as Miles) and Daveed Diggs (as Collin) co-star in Blindspotting, Carlos Lopez Estrada's feature film debut. Casal and Diggs also co-wrote the script, a buddy movie that fictionalizes the details of their lifelong friendship and pays homage to their real-life hometown. But the city that Miles and Collin grew up in is changing. From their perspective, Oakland's gentrifying into an unrecognizable playground for gangs of mostly white, twentysomething techies with seemingly unlimited disposable income. They're buying up and refurbishing formerly black-owned properties while » Read More

Kate and Anna McGarrigle's song, "I'm Losing You," contains a great lament. They sing, "But I never told you anything/How to keep or make a friend." The lyric speaks to that moment when a child starts to establish his or her independence from their parents. Mothers, in the McGarrigle sisters' case, wonder what skills they've equipped their children with to contend with the world at large. The song acknowledges what little control they have over whether people will accept or reject their sons and daughters. In Bo Burnham's film Eighth Grade, that larger world is junior high school, and it's an alienating place for Kayla (Elsie Fisher). » Read More

Maples, who has been in the field for 15 years, recently accepted a position as curator of African Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art. She has often encountered art historians who contend that African art is derivative of Western art. Maples observes that "any time an African picks up a paintbrush or something that is a Western medium, it's not inventive and creative from an African or a visionary standpoint." She believes that's wrong-headed and a problem in the field. Maples notes that, "African art only started getting recognized, particularly contemporary African art, in the last decade, if that." » Read More

The cast of In the Heights, now playing at City Lights Theater Company, would do well to check their headsets before curtain. Last weekend's opening night performance was marred by numbers in which it seemed some singers' mics were turned up to 11 while others were on mute. This was especially unfortunate because Lin-Manuel Miranda's lyrics drive the plot as much as Quiara Alegria Hudes' dialogue does. A lot of songs are structured as conversations between characters, and a lot of those conversations came across as one-sided. The sound issues were even more vexing since City Lights' cast features some stellar voices. Cristina Hernandez is formidable as Nina, who has managed to break out of the barrio in Manhattan's Washington Heights to » Read More

What separates the American Dream from the one in California? The color of the sunset. Won Ju Lim's California Dreamin' at the San Jose Museum of Art is alive with it. She projects photographs of an ordinary Los Angeles street scene onto and across the gallery walls. Lim collected that raw footage herself, editing it at the same time that she worked on the sculptural elements filling up the rest of the room.The images feature palm trees standing in formation against a blue sky washed in reds, oranges and yellows. Buildings line the horizon and merge together. Shadows swallow them up. But as your eyes get accustomed to the darkness, they also focus on the sculpture, a model city. » Read More

A local grassroots effort to fix San Jose's most iconic sign, the Stephen's Meat Products neon dancing pig masterpiece, has raised more than half the money it needs. The Preservation Action Council of San Jose (PAC*SJ), as well as passionate enthusiasts like Heather David, have tapped their networks and pooled their resources, so far raising more than $25,000 toward an estimated goal of $40,000. The plan is heroic: Paint the sign, fill up the bullet holes, re-illuminate the neon components and get that pig dancing again. Over the years, many of San Jose's neon signs have disappeared, while others have been rescued and saved in storage. The Stephen's sign still occupies a minuscule piece of real estate in a parking strip infested with » Read More

"Hey, where's the boyfriend?" your friend asks as she plops down on the couch next to you. You look at your phone: "Well, according to my tracking device, he's at the end of Main, turning right onto Slauson." Jealousy gets a bad rap. Sure, it's sometimes a sign that your self-worth is in the toilet. But it can also be a sign that your boyfriend has been sneaking off to the toilet at work with his boss's busty assistant. Evolutionary psychologist David Buss notes that sexual jealousy appears to be one of the "mate guarding adaptations" that evolved over human history--a sort of police dog of emotions to protect us from being cheated on. Buss observes that sexual jealousy is activated by "threats to mate retention," including "the presence » Read More

"Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic." Whenever that quote appears on the Internet, it's falsely attributed to painter Frida Kahlo. In fact, it was originally composed by poet Marty McConnell. In any case, I'll recommend that you heed it in the coming weeks. You really do need to focus on associating with allies who see the mysterious and lyrical best in you. I will also suggest that you get inspired by a line that Frida Kahlo actually wrote: "Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are a bourbon biscuit." (If you don't know what a bourbon biscuit is, I'll tell you: chocolate buttercream stuffed between two thin rectangular chocolate biscuits.) » Read More

I first met David Eastis 15 years ago when he presided over the Silicon Valley chapter of Slow Food, originally among the first five chapters the U.S. Eastis was the Shakespearean "mine host" of a gluttonous event at the upscale Flea Street Cafe in Menlo Park, where 56 gastronomes of all shapes and sizes feasted at a snail's pace for over three hours. The resulting May 1, 2003, Metro cover story was the first one I ever wrote and one of the first major features on Slow Food anywhere in the Bay Area. I contributed a bottle of Benedictine to the meal, which felt like a Fellini movie in the slow lane, and then quoted Rabelais and John Ruskin in the story. Such were the days. » Read More