Born Jimmy McGill, he was a short-con artist and petty criminal who got a quick degree at a South Pacific law school. As "Saul Goodman" ("It's all good, man!") he became the kind of lawyer that makes other lawyers shudder, recruiting clients with billboards, TV commercials and an inflatable Statue of Liberty on the roof of his office. Now, McGill is cowering in black and white angst under the name Gene Tacovic, managing a Cinnabon at an Omaha mall. Under any name, he's a person of interest to the feds and the Aryan Brotherhood. As the fourth season of Better Call Saul begins, Jimmy keels over from the anxiety induced by the kind of film noir state of panic described by Kirk Douglas in Out of the Past (1947): "You won't be able to answer a » Read More

Army Ranger sniper Quinn McKenna (the Mel Gibson-esque Boyd Holbrook) is on duty in Mexico. While trying to take a shot at a drug cartel chief, Quinn sees something his government doesn't want him to see. To ensure that he's not dismissed as a nut, Quinn steals the helmet and one of the greaves of the murderous alien giant and mails them home. Unfortunately, the artifacts are intercepted by Quinn's bullied son Rory (Jacob Tremblay, of Room), a chess-thlete genius on the Autism spectrum. Soon the government, under the direction of a smirking bureaucrat (Sterling K. Brown) is raiding the place. Xenobiologist Casey (Olivia Munn, game enough and good with a gun) is called in to look at a captured creature, which is how she encounters Quinn. By » Read More

The sounds of a Oaxacan marketplace emanate from one corner of a gallery in the Triton Museum of Art. The sounds are coming from a small speaker covered by a fruit crate that faces Viviana Paredes' steel and glass sculpture Ser y Comer, a street cart displaying ears of corn in a handwoven basket. The basket itself is nestled inside a mound of dried, pale yellow kernels that threaten to spill over the cart's edges. Paredes has etched the word "ESQUITES" in capital letters onto one of the glass, side panels. The cart itself stands on top of a platform made from a dozen wooden fruit crates. In "Alimentos: Glass Work by Viviana Paredes," the artist says she wanted to remind people of Mexico's rich cultural heritage as it pertains to "a » Read More

In Robert Frost's 1914 poem "Mending Wall," the narrator doesn't say, "Good fences make good neighbors." His neighbor does. He wants to mend the stone wall that divides their properties. Instead, it's the narrator, the poet's alter ego, who, after their encounter, asks himself, "If I could put a notion in his head:'Why do they make good neighbors?'" Frost continues with this line of inquiry a few lines later wondering, "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out." Fences, as we've discovered in recent years, have come to symbolize political ideologies that favor division over unity. » Read More

There are 54 card drawings in the Mexican game of Lotería. You'll recognize the images of La Mano (the hand), El Corazon (the heart) and La Calavera (the skull). The hand waves unattached to an arm, the heart is an ugly organ pierced by an arrow, the skull is the smiling face of death staring at you with empty, black sockets for eyes. In his own way, artist Miguel Machuca has created a similarly illustrated universe. Drawing Light from Darkness, the title of his solo show at the Triton Museum, is replete with recurring symbols that fill out his deeply personal mythology. » Read More

Fifty years ago this October, Tommie Smith and John Carlos climbed atop the Olympic medal podium in Mexico City and threw up a fist against racial inequality. As they each removed their shoes and raised a clenched, black-gloved hand in the air, the pair of San Jose State sprinters bowed their heads, symbolically refusing to acknowledge their country's national anthem as it played over the stadium's loudspeakers. Immediate and intense backlash followed. Avery Brundage, the chairman of the International Olympic Committee, called for the two runners to be suspended from the U.S. Olympic Team and banned from the Olympic Village. The U.S. Olympic Committee attempted to defend the athletes, but after Brundage threatened to kick the entire U.S. » Read More

Ken Matsumoto's compound, the ArtObjectGallery, sits on a legendary Japantown parcel, near a Zen meditation studio and an artist's supply shop. Including an exhibit space along with an outdoor sculpture garden where one finds Matsumoto's own work, the complex usually exudes serenity, but last Saturday, the entire property came alive thanks to Salt Stained, a new exhibit of mostly Vietnamese visual artists that runs through Oct. 26. Chopsticks Alley, a local organization that promotes Southeast Asian cultural heritage through food, art and shared expression, organized the exhibit in cooperation with the San Jose Museum of Art's Vietnamese Community Outreach Initiative, New Terrains: Mobility and Migration. » Read More

The first few dates are the free trial period of romantic relationships. Think of it like accepting a sample of lox spread at Costco. You're seeing how you like it; you aren't committing to buy a salmon hatchery. It sounds like you instead see a date as a Wile E. Coyote-style trapdoor dropping you into a relationship. You and the guy have sex for the first time, and assuming he doesn't fake his death afterward or ditch a burner phone he's been texting you from, you two become a thing, right on track to sign up for those cute side-by-side burial plots. » Read More

Author Anne Carson describes part of her creative process in this way: "Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It's usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world." I suspect you might be able to benefit from using a comparable trick in the coming days. That's why you should monitor any odd dreams, seemingly irrational impulses or weird fantasies that arise in you. Although they may not be of any practical value in themselves, they could spur a train of thought that leads you to interesting breakthroughs. » Read More