Nancy Rooks was the housekeeper at Graceland when Elvis Presley died in 1977. Toward the end of Eugene Jarecki's documentary The King, she demonstrates the way to make one of his favorite meals, a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich on white bread. "You put the butter in the skillet and do it like you do a grilled cheese sandwich," Rooks explains. This method is slightly different from the one his cook, the late Mary Jenkins, demonstrates in "The Burger and The King," a 1995 BBC program--she toasted the bread first before putting it in the buttered frying pan--but the message is still the same. Elvis gratified every one of his unhealthy habits until the cumulative effects killed him at 42. » Read More

According to Hollywood Westerns, women find salvation in the arms of the men who rescue them. Wearing heavy wool prairie skirts and floral print blouses, they stand helpless before Indians, snakes and black-hatted ne'er-do-wells. The classic example features John Wayne retrieving Natalie Wood from the Comanches in The Searchers (1956). But the trope persists even in a beautifully crafted movie like Hostiles, released earlier this year, in which Christian Bale escorts the towering screen goddess Rosamund Pike out of Comanche territory (Those Comanches again! You'd think that white folks would have figured out by now why they're trying to protect their own land). » 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

Jeanne Sakata's father never talked about his internment. He didn't want her to hold any resentment toward her country. He hoped his family could move forward and not look back. Her father was in high school when President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized Executive Order 9066 to relocate more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, including U.S. citizens, to internment camps following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. My father would always give me short answers, and then he would change the subject when I would ask about it," Sakata, a Watsonville native, remembers. "After they got out of those camps, many of the nisei--second-generation Japanese Americans--felt that the best way to deal with the trauma was to not talk about it." » Read More

A mud-colored python wraps its body around a resting angel with magenta hair. She is unconcerned by its proximity and rests both of her hands against its curving belly. At the center of a target, a 1940s pin-up model holds the head of a gray garden snake between her thumb and index finger, its silvery length coils around her right forearm. Faded pink cherry blossoms surround them both as satellites race across the sky. In two separate poses, the right arm of a naked saint is held aloft by the tail end of a black and white snake. Even chubby putti ride, cavort and wrestle with snakes in the paintings made by Anthony Riggs in his new exhibit at the Triton Museum of Art. » 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

Surprisingly, the road to respect and good standing in the 12-step world does not involve strolling into meetings smelling like you live in a one-bedroom bong. Your taking care not to show up all "I just took a bath in Chanel No. 420!" at meetings lest you trigger any recovering potheads is what I call "empathy in action." I write in my book, Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck, that empathy--caring about how your behavior affects others--is "at the root of manners." Rudeness, on the other hand, is the lack of consideration for what one's behavior does to another person. I explain it in the book as a form of theft--theft of "valuable intangibles like people's attention (in the case of cell phone shouters who privatize » Read More

Your key theme right now is growth. Let's dig in and analyze its nuances. 1. Not all growth is good for you. It may stretch you too far too fast, beyond your capacity to integrate and use it. 2. Some growth that is good for you doesn't feel good to you. It might force you to transcend comforts that are making you stagnant, and that can be painful. 3. Some growth that's good for you may meet resistance from people close to you; they might prefer you to remain just as you are, and may even experience your growth as a problem. 4. Some growth that isn't particularly good for you may feel pretty good. For instance, you could enjoy working to improve a capacity or skill that is irrelevant to your long-term goals. 5. Some growth is good for you » Read More

In that book, at the height of the Vietnam era, when racist slobs supporting George Wallace predated the racist slobs in the Cult of Trump, Ellison never hesitated to thrash the bejeezus out of any xenophobic rube, anywhere. The same hollow-headed conspiracy trash about blacks, Mexicans, liberals, atheists, commies or hippies "taking over the country" existed then as it does now. The same deranged right wing ammosexuals and their medieval fears poisoned all rational conversation then as they do now. Nothing has changed. What's more, Ellison never sunk to giving ersatz accolades in The Glass Teat. It wasn't his job to be a PR person or a "community builder" for every giddy feel-good show on TV. In one passage he referred to Johnny Carson as » Read More