I’m sick of the Tailhook nature of navigating daily life when people are so blithely rude they let doors slam in the faces of the people behind them, they jostle and slam into others without so much as an “excuse me,” so by the time I retreat back to home base I feel like an abused slab of dough.  

Forget the bickering, back-and-forth and ballot measures. What we’re now doing — and I use “we” to mean whomever accesses city coffers or pulls capital and/or operating budget purse strings — is putting the streetcar before public good and public interest.
  

Anyone who knows the Allen brothers knows it’s a blessing and an honor to do so, but some of us have no idea these men are walking-around Black History Month icons.  

Politicians here are like helicopter parents, mishandling the city in the same blatantly narcissistic manner as parents who bear children for the sole purposes of shaping those children in their images.  

It makes me sad, angry and bewildered every time I see a black person littering, just blatantly tossing down with impunity and careless disregard for their surroundings the remnants of their ghetto diets and their ghetto lifestyles  

At the end of past spring classes I’d spend weeks in a thick-headed fog, obsessing over the state of America’s education system; I was confused by our simultaneous political demonization of China and our dependence on Chinese students to grow and improve our science and technology departments. Wow, I used to think. Then in spring 2009 — after three years of teaching it — I realized how piously I had been thinking.
  

The only movie I can clearly recall seeing on the West Side screen is Lady Sings the Blues in 1972. My parents were finally splitting up the same year that movie came out and I took to the darkness in movie theaters from that point on as my own private Idaho of insular thinking, mourning and disappearance. Darkness: visible.  

I’d pay to see a lineup of all the children and grandchildren of right-wingers — especially those directly responsible for legally shoving their definitions of “family” down all our throats — all come out publicly in a public square. I bet there are a shit-ton of ’em.
  

Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati’s Black Pearl Sings! is a play come as a warning shot foretelling the modern-day recording industry (such as it is) and its sad history of theft by corporate henchmen. More obviously and tellingly, the play is also a dance of race relations, race politics and the sometimes heartbreaking history of relationships between black and white women.
  

 What work ethic I have — especially the stamina and energy to plow through until the end — I got from her. Our mother never stopped. My three blood siblings and the four stepchildren she raised can all attest to the fact that she never stopped parenting us.