Run and Shoot may sound like a basketball slogan, but it’s actually the name of a transmedia company that founded the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival ten years ago. This year’s festival, headed by husband and wife team Floyd and Stephanie Rance, will feature close to fifty films, including shorts and feature-length films, which will screen at the Performing Arts Center, the Oak Bluffs Public Library and the Harbor View Hotel.

In London, the Olympians are battling it out in feats of strength and endurance. Here on the Vineyard, we have our own contest coming up, no less feverish in its pursuit of glory, ribbons to the victors, too, but with the scales tilted to right brain activities rather than speed and brawn. Welcome once again to the All-Island Art Show.

This Monday, August 6, will bring an unlikely visitor to the Island, a Dodd harpsichord. It’s not a total stranger to the Island, but Chamber Music Society artistic director Dee Stevens estimates that it’s been 20 years since it’s been heard here. This Monday and Tuesday, Ms. Stevens will play the rare instrument in a chamber music concert featuring the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and his sons.

It was fitting, maybe inevitable, that Yoko Ono and John Lennon met in an art gallery at a showing of her work in London. Now, more than 40 years later, Ms. Ono has established a tradition of exhibiting Mr. Lennon’s art around the United States to celebrate her late husband’s passion for peace and love, which she says with a matter-of-factness that restores those words to their late-1960s meaning, before they became glib catchphrases for many people.

Dressed in a simple tunic, carrying only his slingshot and a sack of stones, a poor shepherd boy approached the nine-foot-tall giant.

With courage and a steady hand, David slung one small stone right smack at Goliath’s head, knocking out the Philistine’s war hero.

It’s a tale most are familiar with and at the forefront of the underdog mentality, said liberal theologian Harvey Cox.

“We like the underdog,” said Mr. Cox. “That’s why everyone in the Boston area despises the New York Yankees.”

You won’t find beef tripe on the menu at the Aquinnah Shop Restaurant. It’s made from part of a cow’s stomach, which may be slightly less appealing to Island visitors than fresh seafood caught offshore. But Jacob Vanderhoop, head chef at the restaurant, knows how to cook tripe. He learned this and other exotic cooking techniques at Le Cordon Bleu Culinary School in Cambridge this past winter.

Author Jill Iscol headlines the Speakeasy series on Wednesday, August 8, at the Granary Gallery, located on Old County Road in West Tisbury. The Speakeasy events are hosted by the Granary Gallery and State Road Restaurant, in collaboration with the West Tisbury Library Foundation, Inc., to benefit the library’s capital campaign.

Washashore Art

One clever way to clean up a beach is to collect trash and turn it into art. That’s what artist and art teacher Wendy Shalen did, using found floating debris from beaches on the Vineyard, Long Island and Florida as subject matter for her handmade paper seascapes. The series is called Washed Ashore, and was recently exhibited at the Pound Ridge Library in New York.

The images show the closeness of nature and material culture. Garbage can be collected on some beaches as easily as drift wood.

The first Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society Livestock Show and Fair was held on October 26, 1858: it was announced on September 15 of that year. And thus began a pilgrimage that would be unfamiliar in nature though familiar in spirit to modern-day fairgoers: 1,800 people made their way to the Grange Hall in West Tisbury by horseback, in wagons or on foot.

Up the stairs to Barney Zeitz’s bedroom, light peeks in from the stained glass pieces on the wall, leaving purple and blue shadows on the wood. The railing on the right, welded by Mr. Zeitz, curves alongside the stairs until it meets his and his wife’s bedroom door.

“That’s one of the first windows I actually saved, it was a keeper,” Mr. Zeitz said of the leaded stained glass window in his room, depicting winter trees with a glowing red sun. He made it when he was 22 years old.