The luckless Logan family of West Virginia has endured its share of misfortunes: melancholy brother Clyde (Adam Driver) lost a hand when he was a soldier in Iran. Now he's the depressed bartender at the Duck Tape Bar and Grill. Brother Jimmy (Channing Tatum) was an NFL prospect who had a career ending injury. He had a job driving heavy machinery, up until the day the boss asks him to come into his office and to shut the door after him. Jimmy's ex-wife (an attractively tragic-faced Katie Holmes) married a car-dealing imbecile with a mini-mansion, while Jimmy abides in a single-wide. » Read More

This is essential viewing. Director Sabaah Folayan's Whose Streets? is a non-narrated documentary, woven from interviews, smartphone and small camera footage of the civil disturbances in Ferguson, Missouri, in summer 2014, as well as the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement afterward. The St. Louis exurb of Ferguson (population 24,000) is in one of the five poorest ZIP codes in the state. The protests began after a police officer shot and killed a local named Michael Brown, 18. They left his body on the street for four and a half hours while they photographed the scene. National and local TV news were stunned by the uprising that followed. "Stores being looted!" was the lead on one night of NBC's coverage; we hear an unidentified » Read More

What began as a ritual bonfire on Baker Beach back in 1986 has blossomed into the most iconic counterculture festival in the country, offering an ephemeral home to hundreds of large-scale, hallucinatory art projects-many of which involve fire. "There were a lot of works that were really inspiring," says Kerry Hapner, San Jose's director of cultural affairs; Hapner attended the event for the first time last year. "What you see is that people really participate in the event. There's no boundary between us and them. Everybody is actively engaged and part of the experience." Captivated by the experimental vigor of the annual festival, Hapner wondered if there was any way for her to bring the spirit of the playa back to San Jose. » Read More

Surfing has recently produced some excellent works of nonfiction that have little to do with stoned-out surfer stereotypes. Last year's Pulitzer Prize for autobiography went to William Finnegan for Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. Steve Kotler's West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origins of Belief is a fine book on the intersection of surfing and spirituality. And I'll add Jaimal Yogis' new memoir, All Our Waves Are Water: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment and the Perfect Ride, to the mix. Yogis, a San Francisco-based author, wrote the book as a follow-up to Saltwater Buddha, a coming-of-age story that blends surfing and spiritual seeking. All Our Waves picks up where he left off in his previous work and chronicles Yogis' » Read More

A block from the main corridor of the First Friday Walk, a mass of artsy youth congregated at Social Policy for "Our Heaven"-a mixed-media showcase of 19 local artists with a single common thread. Inside SoPo, a half-animated video was playing on the wall. Spicy soup bases, udon noodles and soy sauce bottles lined the brightly lit aisles of a supermarket. It was a familiar sight for those of us who grew up accompanying our parents to the store-if your family was Asian, that is. The video was created by Josiah Columna, a Filipino American artist whose stop-motion animation and found footage mashup was one of many works on display at the cafe-by-day, gallery-by-night venue on Friday. » Read More

One plan for this past weekend involved setting priorities, defining goals and establishing a regimented schedule. Another involved a more nomadic approach, wandering through the masses with only abstract goals in mind. Or, there was Plan C, reserved for those who refuse to identify on a binary of nomadic-sedentary: navigating a tightrope between both options. At its best, the festival showed the possibilities of interconnected cosmopolitan worldliness. The variety of folks ranged from jazzed-out AARP-level veterans to texting millennial hipsters. Decades-long experts traded tips with festival first-timers. At any moment one could choose from 88-year-old Jimmy Cobb playing straight-ahead jazz, Czech kids playing Dixieland or Taimane » Read More

A guy my girlfriend dated seven years ago is now an aspiring artist, and he gave my girlfriend one of his paintings. It's abstract, splashy and horrible. I find it disrespectful of him to give it to her (because she's in a relationship). She said he does lots of paintings, sells almost none, and gives them as gifts to all of his friends. I asked her to throw it away, but she said that would be "too mean" and shoved it under the bed. Am I being overly jealous, or is it wrong to accept gifts from exes? » Read More

Congratulations! I expect that during the next three weeks, you will be immune to what psychoanalyst Joan Chodorow calls "the void of sadness, the abyss of fear, the chaos of anger, and the alienation of contempt and shame." I realize that what I just said might sound like an exaggeration. Aren't all of us subject to regular encounters with those states? How could you possibly go so long without brushing up against them? I stand by my prediction, and push even further. For at least the next three weeks, I suspect you will also be available for an inordinate amount of what Chodorow calls "the light of focused insight" and "the playful, blissful, all-embracing experience of joy." » Read More

Every time the San Jose Jazz Summer Fest comes around, not enough emphasis is placed on the educational arm of the San Jose Jazz operation. To focus on just one example, Progressions is an intensive program helping low-income, at-risk youth develop their musical talents, a process inseparable from learning teamwork, social skills and critical thinking. The goal is to keep elementary-age kids out of gangs, in school and locked in a groove toward a creative life, so much so that the program is partly sponsored by the Mayor's Gang Prevention Task Force. Progressions started in the spring of 2011 at Santee Elementary, which is part of the Franklin-McKinley School District. During its first year, the program taught kindergarten through third » Read More