Jean Thompson’s Wide Blue Yonder soars while Douglas Glover gives his best with Bad News of the Heart
What's extraordinary about the human condition is the pull to leave the dysfunction, strife and emotional conflicts of our physical world and plunge into the dysfunction, strife and emotional conflicts of another's imagined world. Here lies the soothing ointment of fiction. What weighs heavily upon that investment of time and need for escape is the…
Home Work
Some time ago, somebody somewhere figured out that it was good social, economic and political policy to create incentives promoting home ownership. Each year the Powers That Be in the public and private sector look for additional ingredients to modify or add to our current cornucopia of tax incentives — first-time buyer programs, for example,…
Instant Vintage
I live in column time. My clocks tic snatches of conversations and tocks moments when humanity notices itself. Suddenly war, AIDS, famine and empires make sense. This is dedicated to all those times when nobody sees it but you. "There's something in the way of things," says Amiri Baraka. The morning of my 38th birthday,…
Whirlygig: 75: Out on the Town
Space Invaders There's an unspoken rule about comfort zones when it comes to personal space, wouldn't you agree? I can't tell you exactly what it is. I just know when someone has overstepped the boundary. Case in point: I was downtown at lunchtime and thought that nothing would satisfy my hunger better than a corned…
Film: Blockbuster with Heart
Woodrow J. Hinton Mutants Wolverine (left), Nightcrawler and Storm play the heroes in X2: X-Men United. Bryan Singer, director of the 2001 blockbuster X-Men as well as its hotly anticipated sequel, climbs the stairs of a swanky Los Angeles hotel and surveys the scene. Sitting around him are a few dozen journalists eating lunch…
News: Bush Still Draws Protests
CANTON — The apparent end of combat in Iraq doesn't mean the end of street demonstrations against the Bush Administration. The April 24 protest that greeted President Bush during his visit to the Timken Co. wasn't especially large. But the 150 protesters easily outnumbered the few dozen Bush supporters outside the steel company's research…
News: As Death Approaches
Leslie Blade Jerome Campell's supporters include (standing) City Councilman John Cranley, local NAACP First Vice President Ishton Morton and (sitting) NAACP board member Art Slater and former U.S. Rep. Tom Luken. COLUMBUS — With two weeks left before his execution, skepticism about Jerome Campbell's guilt seems to have spread to the Ohio Adult Parole…
City Says Yes to Anti-CAC
It's a hot Sunday evening, surprisingly summer-like for April, and Fred Lane keeps busy bartending on the second floor of SSNOVA, the performance arts space he helped create two years ago inside the massive Mockbee Building. Lane is an unassuming art pioneer and landlord, responsible for setting up Semantics Gallery in a Brighton Corner storefront…
News: Compromised Compass
A single word can say a lot, and that's why the word "diversity" was expunged from a list of 12 goals for planning Hamilton County's future. The word was dropped by a group of government and civic leaders called the Planning Partnership, charged with refining goals collected from public input. The list of goals was…
Cover Story: ‘I’m the Kind of Guy Who Plans for Things to Get Better’
Matt Borgerding Superintendent Alton Frailey visits several schools a week. Raised in rural poverty, he says the urban version is much more destructive. Alton Frailey is late, but you'd never know it by watching him. It's 1:04 p.m. April 24. The new Cincinnati Public Schools superintendent's 1 p.m. Budget Commission meeting at the school…
Puttin’ Out the Bone
Asking Anderson High School to objectively evaluate the wisdom of calling their sports teams "Redskins" would be like asking Pete Rose to give an impersonal review of whether he has a gambling problem. Anderson recently formed a diversity committee that met during this school year and — not surprisingly — voted to keep the school's…
1629 Cooper St.
Jymi Bolden Address: 1629 Cooper St., Northside Owner: Centex Home Equity Corp. Value: $18,300 according to the Hamilton County Auditor's Office Year Built: 1880 Comments: Marge Halpin, an inspector with the Cincinnati Department of Buildings and Inspections, says she's been inspecting this building since the spring of 2002. "I never caught anybody living in…
