Arts

Several years ago, Columbus resident David Bynum had a chance to meet his birth mother, but he ultimately lost his nerve. It wasn’t until his late 50s that the retired correctional officer finally gave in to his curiosity and set out to learn who he really was.   

The results can be seen in the homey documentary he wrote, narrated and directed, From a Place of Love—My Adoption Journey. Though Bynum had waited too long to meet either of his birth parents, his search did lead to the discovery of family members he’d never known he had. He also learned something about the societal forces that likely drove his mother to give him up for adoption.

Linda Evans was a White woman who’d fallen in love with Chuck Comer, a Black athlete who played college football (though not at Ohio State, as Bynum had long thought). When Linda became pregnant, the prevailing prejudice against interracial romance apparently led her to give up her young son. 

The long-running radio show, The DJBC Happy Hour is celebrating a full decade on the Columbus airwaves on WCRS with a special two-hour show, which will air on April 12 and April 19 at 8PM each night.

The DJBC Happy Hour debuted on WCRS-FM on April 18, 2011, and has aired on Monday nights ever since on the low power FM station in Columbus.

This Special Anniversary Show will feature new original material, plus take a look back at some of the show’s best moments, with special retrospectives in homage to the show talking about Ohio State football, and the Columbus community. Those two clip montages will be part of the first hour of the Anniversary Special, which will air on April 12.

The long-running radio show, The DJBC Happy Hour is celebrating a full decade on the Columbus airwaves on WCRS with a special two-hour show, which will air on April 12 and April 19 at 8PM each night.

The DJBC Happy Hour debuted on WCRS-FM on April 18, 2011, and has aired on Monday nights ever since on the low power FM station in Columbus.

This Special Anniversary Show will feature new original material, plus take a look back at some of the show’s best moments, with special retrospectives in homage to the show talking about Ohio State football, and the Columbus community. Those two clip montages will be part of the first hour of the Anniversary Special, which will air on April 12.

We know what kind of changes can kill a city, particularly in the so-called Rust Belt. But what does it take to bring that city back to life?

According to The Place That Makes Us, it takes activists who are passionately devoted to their hometown, even if they’re too young to know what it was like in its heyday. Karla Murthy’s 70-minute documentary focuses on a small group of such people who are working to revive Youngstown, Ohio.

When the industrial burg’s steel mills started closing down in the 1970s, thousands of residents were left without work. Many left in search of employment, while others stayed but were unable to find jobs that could support them and their families. The result is a city filled with abandoned and neglected homes, including many that are beyond repair.

“It kind of overwhelms me…all the work we have to do,” says Ian Beniston, one of the doc’s featured activists. As executive director of the nonprofit Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation, Ian focuses on restoring areas of town marked by boarded-up windows and other signs of blight.

An Earth without art is “meh.” In the last year, since COVID lockdowns and restrictions began, artists have turned to creating art to cope with isolation. The arts community in Franklinton marked the one-year anniversary of the global pandemic with a special art show, which was all about change.

The March exhibition at 400 West Rich, “Evolution in Isolation” was a tribute and a reflection on the year that showcase some of the artistic changes that have taken place since the Pandemic began. Artists have had to find ways to create meaningful pieces of work over the last year.

The description that 400 Square gave in promoting this exhibit could be comparable to our everyday lives since the pandemic began: “There was a ‘before’ the COVID-19 pandemic, but there is not yet an ‘after.’ Everything has changed, and these changes are reflected nearly everywhere we look, including our artwork.”

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The weather in Philadelphia can be bad. If it rained more, they could call it the Schuylkill Bay instead of the Schuylkill River. Though the nearby Delaware River is bigger, the Schuylkill has its own history, some yet to be made.

A distance from the river, centered at the bubble end of a lane, Anton Evers’ home stood as a kind of beacon. The builders of the houses on the lane used red bricks for every house except Evers’. His are white.

Evers opened the second-floor front door and peered out into the morning rain, which produced a pleasant cadence on the lids of the cans on the sidewalk below. Rain made it a bad day to collect trash, or deliver the newspaper.

But Toby Wallace didn’t mind, because today was his last day throwing the paper as he walked. A boy turns 16 only once, and that was today. Tonight, he’d pilot a car that used to belong to someone else. After tonight, it belonged to him.

He was most excited to show his new wheels to his two friends, his only friends, B-drop and Tick. But the trio rarely saw each other, because B-drop and Tick were in a gang known as the Front Street Boyz.

In 2020’s Promising Young Woman, Carey Mulligan plays a woman whose life has been forever changed by a sexual assault—a sexual assault that happened not to her, but to a friend who was too incapacitated to give consent.  

In Test Pattern, Brittany S. Hall plays a woman who actually falls victim to such an assault after she’s been numbed by alcohol and drugs. But compared to its predecessor, the new film takes a less direct and more complicated approach to the subject. Rather than focus solely on sexual politics, writer-director Shatara Michelle Ford branches out into other areas, including the unmapped intersection of race and romance. 

It’s a sign of the film’s multifaceted concerns that the assault doesn’t happen until well into its brief running time. Until then, Ford concentrates on developing the relationship between Renesha (Hall), a young Black executive living in Austin, and Evan (Will Brill), a White tattoo artist. 

To America

Foreword

The idea of The Exercise – cooperation between the country’s two major political parties, on purpose, and why – is fiction, not fact.

Before any fact ever becomes a proven fact, it has a degree of likelihood. When something is proven as fact, it has a 100 percent degree of likelihood. Below that 100 percent, however, lie murky depths, the deeper, the murkier.

The idea of The Exercise has a high degree of likelihood, in large part because fictional Progress Party shotcaller Jack Barns conceived a need for it. No political party can exist in a vacuum.

This brings up an interesting philosophical question: why? Two possible answers: for good, or for evil.

For good? Nope. That really is fiction. There may be room in politics for it, but altruism rarely makes an appearance, by choice or by chance.

For evil? Now, we’re getting somewhere. Behind all the rhetoric, public bickering and inability of elected officials to represent their constituents of every party, or no party, lies the idea of The Exercise.

Don’t let the door hit you in the ass. That’s the way most of us feel about 2020.

In Yearly Departed, the hated year gets a funnier and slightly more thoughtful sendoff. A group of female comics deliver a series of “eulogies” that reveal feelings ranging from relief to regret—relief that 2020 is over and regret over some of the things it and its pandemic stole from us.

Tiffany Haddish leads off with one of the funnier bits, a mournful farewell to casual sex. “Casual sex was my rock,” she says tearfully, remembering how much comfort it brought her when, for example, she had a bad night at the comedy club. She adds that the loss is even harder when she goes out in public and realizes how sexy men are when they’re wearing masks and standing 6 feet away.   

Natasha Rothwell invokes the Black Lives Matter movement when she satirically (and probably prematurely) mourns the loss of TV cop shows. Given all that’s happened, she says, it’s just too hard to believe dramas in which the police actually solve crimes and treat everybody equally.

Following Donald Trump’s triumph in the 2016 election, Ohio writer Jef Benedetti asked a disturbing but not impossible question: What if the two major political parties were colluding to keep power at the top while keeping the rest of the country divided? What if the divisive Trump administration was intentionally manufactured?

Benedetti captures all of this in a political thriller called The Exercise. You might want to read the non-fiction book Disloyal by Michael Cohen at the same time.

The story is set in Philadelphia, with intrigue, sex, murder, and power struggles aplenty. Part of The Exercise outlines how the two major parties select highly emotional so-called “wedge issues” to control the voting masses.

When the book was released a few years back, Benedetti stated: “The press in general is the only reliable conduit of information about our government for the citizenry and others living in the U.S. Benedetti points out that it is no coincidence “a story like The Exercise therefore could have had only one hero: a reporter.”