Pissing on the Poor
The images from New Orleans and Mississippi were horrible the week after Hurricane Katrina struck: old people slumped in wheelchairs, babies in dirty diapers and everyone else in between, almost all with empty eyes. During the occasional glimpse at the Superdome or the Convention Center or a flattened Gulfport via news coverage, it quickly became…
Cover Story: Powers Behind the Powerhouse Factory
Sean Hughes Cool Issue 2005 Arbiters of cool know it when they see it, especially when they're making it. The trick is not to act like it, not to be a postmodern poseur of style without the stability of substance. The pop culture landscape is as crowded as a sports arena in a hurricane with…
News to Use
Swing the Swing State Four ballot initiatives on the ballot Nov. 8 could drastically change the way Ohio elects politicians — and the next president. Ed Jerse, a former member of the Ohio House of Representatives from the Cleveland area, discusses the four constitutional amendments that Reform Ohio Now has put before Ohio voters and…
Wellness Directory
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Uneasy In Public
A friend of mine is setting up a Web site with some of her friends for feminist (mostly queer) porn. I'm straight, and she asked me if I wanted to be in it, with or without my boyfriend of two years. After clarifying that I wouldn't be making porn with people I didn't want to…
Freedom from Comfort
In The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts described it as the backwards law: "When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink you float. When you hold your breath you lose it — which immediately calls to mind an ancient but much neglected saying, 'Whosoever…
Diner: A Grand Gesture
Velocitization. It's a term traffic engineers use to describe what happens when you drive fast for an extended period: Your sensory system attunes to your speed, you cease to realize how fast you're going, and it becomes hard to slow down (think of transitioning from a speeding highway to a too-short exit ramp). It's also…
The Buzz Is Back
After a three-year absence, the Camp Buzz music festival returns to the Camp America grounds in Oxford on Friday and Saturday. The outdoor event began in 1994 and grew to become one of the cooler, Jam-friendly fests in the region. While previous years have featured many regional and national touring acts, this year's Camp Buzz…
Cover Story: Attack of the Pod People
Let's face it, kids, iPods are "cool." I know this for several reasons: (a) It sometimes seems like every fifth person on the street is wearing one (the ratio increases the closer you get to a college), (b) when I put "iPods are cool" into Google, I get 1,650,000 search results, mostly trying to sell…
News: Peacing It Together
Graham Lienhart Designed for business use, Margaret Casarez's Peace Model can help families. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said peace isn't only a goal but also a means. Turning that from an abstract concept into a viable option for people to use everyday is the goal of a workshop called "The Peace Model." Taught…
Cover Story: Cool Flicks
King Kong BEE SEASON (Fox Searchlight, opening in November) Lowdown: Two of cinema's most beautiful actors, Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche, come together in this broken-family drama based on Myra Goldberg's novel. When young Eliza Naumann (newcomer Flora Cross) begins a streak of spelling bee victories, her troubled family discovers a chance to heal…
N*W*C: N*GGER WETB*CK CH*NK
Carol Peterson (L-R) Allan Axibal, Rafael Agustin and Miles Gregley are the creators of N*W*C: N*GGER WETB*CK CH*NK, which could bring a whiff of controversy to town next spring. Well, Dorothy, we're not in Kansas anymore. In fact, it doesn't sound much like Cincinnati either: Next spring the Cincinnati Arts Association (CAA) will present N*W*C:…
Cover Story: Declaration of Independence
David Sorcher Randy Weaver wants to school local Hip Hop artists on the music business. Anyone overhearing Randy Weaver say he wants to change artists' minds and restore independent Hip Hop's viability through a nonprofit Web site might assume he has a Napoleon complex. Yet Napoleon censored and policed artists. Weaver sees his Web…
Music: Wussy Galore
Shake It Records Wussy is (L-R) Mark Messerly, Lisa Walker, Chuck Cleaver and Dawn Burman Improbable seems the only logical way to describe Wussy, and it might turn out that the only thing more improbable than their actual existence is the palpable prospect of the rootsy Pop/Rock outfit's success. Take the band's membership, for instance.…
Cover Story: Cut-and-Paste Culture
Doug Coombe DJ Clark Warner curated the original exhibition of Sacred and Profane, opening at the CAC, Oct. 1. People tend to relegate sensory experience to specific settings — concert venues for listening, museums for looking. But two fall exhibitions in Cincinnati probe this often-ignored concept with a question: How do sound and sight…
Pop Star Candidates and Voice Analysis
Matt Borgerding New Orleans evacuees arrive at Linwood Elementary School. Justin Jeffre, the boy-band singer who whined so much about not being taken seriously as a candidate for mayor of Cincinnati, got another smackdown last week as the primary campaign came to a close. An anonymous racist generated a recorded phone call to many voters…
Guess Who’s Not Coming
Hyperconscious of its image, Cincinnati gloms onto magazine surveys enumerating its ranking among the country's most livable cities, the best cities for singles and other faux-statistical indicators of greatness. But while studies showing the city and Hamilton County losing population have become fodder for political candidates, jealously pointing to the building boom in nearby West…
‘Two Moms’ Is the Conservative Approach
Take the seemingly simple question: Who is a child's mother? Then stir up that question with surrogates, egg and sperm donors, artificial insemination and same-gender couples, add the California Supreme Court and see what happens. Back in 1994 the California high court, undeniably a player in the culture wars, held that a child could have…
Upcoming Concert Reviews of Sufjan Stevens, Richard Swift and More…
Denny Renshaw Sufjan Stevens Sufjan Stevens with Laura Viers Wednesday · Southgate House Sufjan Stevens has a lot to say. His latest long player, Illinois, puts forth 22 songs in 74 minutes and 13 seconds. And by Illinois, he means all of it. The 30-year-old Detroit native (he currently calls Brooklyn home) had this to…
Locals Only: : Quadrosceneia
Jeanine Boutiere Kohai Kohai has written a Rock opera, but I'm not sure they intended to or even realize they've done it. On their debut release, What We Are Waiting For, songwriter Shaun Henry filters experiences through the lens of Cincinnati's music scene with a single-mindedness that produces a strikingly cohesive work. Starting with a…
Don’t Print Bengals Playoff Tickets Just Yet
Jerry Dowling Among the exceptions to Cincinnati's often-noted reticence concerning newcomers, Marvin Lewis is the most current and, other than Jerry Springer, the most famous. But not even Lewis has fully comprehended the futility in the folkways among fans of the professional football team. For that, we can be grateful. If puzzled. Take a look…
Truly Good Work
Thank you so much for the wonderful cover story about the True Body Project ("True Body and the Write Stuff," issue of Sept. 7-13). ArtWorks is proud of all of its summer programs and grateful to CityBeat for its continued support and coverage of the program. The True Body Project was one of seven spectacular…
Barresi’s
If you like Italian food, I suspect you know BARRESI'S in Deer Park (4111 Webster Ave.), which has been around in one form or another since the early 1960s. Its longtime owners, Sal and Odessa Barresi, recently sold it, but that's good news: The new owner is SARAH WAGNER, who started out as a busser…
Crawfish on a Sweatshirt
I've held on to it all these years, this green sweatshirt with a big red crawfish on the front and the caption reading "New Orleans Crawfish." I found it in a bottom dresser drawer. That morning, when New Orleans was at its bleakest, I dug out my old sweatshirt and turned off the television for…
