San Francisco Chronicle Arts & Entertainment - Spoken Edition

Holy Craft has the priciest beers at this year’s Outside Lands. Outside Lands 2018: Drink prices have gotten out of control No one goes to a music festival for cheap drinks. When you enter the festival gates, you are willfully submitting to a universe in which a slice from Escape from New York Pizza costs $10. That’s usually OK. That’s the bargain you make. But at this year’s Outside Lands, the prices of drinks have gone to a new level of absurdity.

The oldest child starts out as an only child, which is probably why the oldest child is so annoyed by the middle child. The middle child never gets to be an only child, which explains why the middle child is so middle child. The youngest child gets to be the only child after he gets rid of his predecessors. Brother Not X was an only child in South Ozone Park from Aug.

Long before having children of my own, I asked an author and father how long he thought it might take me to return to writing after giving birth. Two weeks, he said. “Maybe a month, if you’re nursing.” I held onto that assertion throughout my pregnancy, but then — like many of my best laid plans—it went awry. His situation was not mine, after all; I had two babies at once, and I was the one attempting to nurse them both.

Caleon Fox is also the creator of “AnimeFit 9000,” a show he writes and stars in on Super Deluxe, the online content platform owned by TBS. Rapper Caleon Fox of Oakland produces and performs the music, makes the videos and comes up with the eye-catching artwork for his releases. Caleon Fox says, as a kid “I was very socially awkward. I was always in my own head. A lot. But I always accepted who I was. It got to a point where I stopped giving a f—. I am who I am.

My daughter and son-in-law joined us last weekend for a family get-together in the mountains. Naturally, they brought along our first grandchild, a 14-month-old girl. It had been a few weeks since I’d seen my little granddaughter, and considering her advanced age, I thought maybe things would change. But when I made a beeline for her and threw out my arms for a welcoming embrace, it was clear that she still hated me.

Left: “Menstrual Bindi” by Vasudhaa Narayanan is among the works by artists of color in the gallery’s 27th juried exhibition. From 1936 to 1966, a New York City mail carrier named Victor Hugo Green published an essential road-trip guide titled “The Negro Motorist Green Book.” “The Green Book,” as it was called, was a product of the Jim Crow era, a time when black drivers were routinely denied everything from gas to food to lodging — and worse.

“Puzzle” belongs to a category of movie that deserves some attention: the secret genius movie. This invariably is the story of someone living a somewhat disappointing life, but not a horrible life by any means, who finds out that he or she is a mathematician of dazzling dimension, a chess master in waiting, or, in the case of “Puzzle,” a puzzle assembler of world-class speed.

RYAN KOST’S OFF-THE-RADAR PICK Carly Rae Jepsen is playing The Independent on Thursday night, and you should do everything in your power to go. Am I biased? Probably. Did I once write hundreds of words about how much I (really, really, really really, really, really) like CRJ? I did. Did some of you send me hate mail as a result? You did; I didn’t care.

Having once lost three children in one day, you’d think I’d be good at it but, no, this whole sending-Zane-away-to-school comes under the category of crunchy grief.

My wife is aging before my eyes. Not physically, of course, but mentally. She’s clearly concerned about the years taking a toll on her brain, because she’s taken up bridge. I’ve got nothing against the game of bridge. It’s the perfect activity — for old people. My grandmother played bridge. And then she died. “You are way too young to be playing bridge,” I said to my wife last week as she headed off for her weekly lesson.

Michael Deni of Geographer performs at the Fillmore in San Francisco. The musician is relocating to Los Angeles in August. Michael Deni of Geographer gave his last concert as a San Franciscan at the Fillmore. San Francisco is about to lose another good one. Michael Deni, the musician who records and performs under the moniker Geographer, played his last concert as a local in front of a sold-out crowd at the Fillmore on Saturday, July 28.

Who was Ernst Lubitsch? To the converted, Lubitsch is a cinema god. He’s the genius behind such comic masterpieces as “Trouble in Paradise” (1932), “The Shop Around the Corner” (1940) and “To Be or Not to Be” (1942). Those of us who admire him spend a good chunk of time puzzling breathlessly over how he did what he did, how he made such sexy, smart and fluid films. Alfred Hitchcock called him “a man of pure cinema.

This may have been the best week in the history of Western civilization for women’s athletics starting when Steffi Graf played Venus Williams in an insanely great rain-punctuated quarterfinal match at Wimbledon that produced some of the most brain-boggling tennis ever seen. Venus Williams is an astonishing athlete not yet in her prime; Steffi Graf is an astonishing athlete just past her prime.

When a note from professional pianist Joshua Raoul Brody popped up in my inbox, with a subject line referencing a column preferring Flower Piano amateurs to Flower Piano pros, I winced. “I am one of the scheduled piano players to whom you gave only medium-sized shrift, as compared with the praise you heaped upon the walk-ups,” he began. I hunkered down, ready to be scolded. But “I am totally with you in that,” he wrote.

There’s a relationship between the writer and the reader. Some have glanced at this column once and decided they don’t want to read anything more about the crazy quilt family in the bedlam bungalow in the outer outer outer outer Excelsior. And there are those of you who read week after week, silent witnesses to this pilgrimage we call family. We tell you the story and the telling changes you and it changes us.