Arts & Culture

Bobby Conn and the Glass Gypsies have written the funniest political satire album of the year. But don’t laugh at this glammed up six-piece from Chicago. The art is high; it’s just their scruples that are low. In the making of The Homeland, Bobby Conn effortlessly channels the essence of several of his heroes. It’s as if David Bowie and Freddie Mercury merged together and made the ideal anti-Bush album with Frank Zappa as the producer.

The Gypsies sophisticated Syncopation blasts the opening track, “We Come in Peace” wide open. This song mocks the right wing view of the war in Iraq. Bobby Conn playfully offers up the lines, "We are your friends, we come in peace /We brought our guns to set you free." With the band driving full force, Conn mocks the status quo with contemptuous lines like, “We have no fear of your disgust /You hate us ‘cause your jealous of success.”

In Fahrenheit 9/11 Michael Moore rather rudely sets out to show George W Bush to be an illegitimate president, a fool, and hopelessly compromised and corrupted by big oil and its business links to Saudi Arabia. Whatever your politics you'll have difficulty convincing yourself that he doesn't succeed in these aims. Plenty of reviewers other than Hitchens have admired the film but, partly because Hitchens would want to think that his review (like all his opinions) was being taken more seriously than anyone else's, let's look only at his. It may also be a fair way in which to make a case against the adventurism of the COW (Coalition Of the Willing) attack on Saddam, and against the neocon world vision thing more generally. Hitchens is able to argue their case for them more ably than can the neocons themselves, and his rants against Moore are ones that most of the neocon, chickenhawk, Bush/Cheney apologists and puppetmasters would be proud to call their own if they were as smart.

Bob Fitrakis is at his best when he writes about George Voinovich at his worst. Catching Voinovich at his worst was not that hard when the former "frugal" Cleveland mayor and future "moderate" U.S. senator held statehouse ethics hostage as Ohio's governor in the 1990s. So it's not surprising that The Fitrakis Files: The Brothers Voinovich and the Ohiogate Scandal -- the fourth compilation of the Columbus State Community College professor, lawyer, activist, and talk-radio firebrand's writings -- is probably his best.

That's not to say the first three Fitrakis Files -- Spooks, Nukes & Nazis, The Schoolhouse Divided and Free Byrd & Other Cries of Justice are not exemplary. How could I say otherwise when I co-wrote some of the entries in the Byrd book? But The Brothers Voinovich and the Ohiogate Scandal rises above the others because the Voinovich clan and the brownshirts who did their bidding made such easy targets as they turned statehouse sleaze into an art form.

SUPER SIZE ME, now playing at the Drexel East, is one of the very few films that can be called a "Must-See" for all Americans.  Whether you eat at McDonald's or not.  

It's rare a piece of reportage that can cut to the very heart---or stomach---of the American way of life.  But Morgan Spurlock's solid, brilliant and cunning documentary is one for the ages.

Spurlock builds his case carefully.  In great physical condition to start, he visits three physicians and a physical therapist to document his weight, cholesterol, heart functions and more.  He starts out at six-feet-two, 185 pounds, with vital statistics that could easily get him sent to Iraq (which McDonald's would probably like to see at this point).  .

Then he embarks on a solid month of eating at McDonald's.  Starting with what must be the most graphic barf in US film history (you might do well to turn your head during this scene), we follow the downward spiral of Spurlock's body to the brink of fast food death.  

Bob Fitrakis, The Fitrakis Files: Free Byrd and other cries for justice. Columbus: Columbus Alive Publishing, 2003. 252 pp.

"When, in countries that are called civilized, we see age going to the work-house, and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong in the system of government. . . . Civil government does not consist in executions. . . . Why is it that scarcely any are executed but the poor?"

These are the words of Thomas Paine, the greatest pamphleteer in the history of the English language.

Bob Fitrakis writes in the tradition of Paine. Free Byrd consists of articles originally published in Columbus Alive and the Columbus Free Press during the decade 1992-2002. The articles set forth specifics about several related subjects, including a number of capital cases, and the death in Franklin County jail of Michael Hiles. The two themes most thoroughly explored in these articles are, first, the unjust trial, sentencing, and execution of John Byrd; and second, the inadequacy of the Office of the Ohio Public Defender in representing Byrd and other capital defendants.

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Gorgeous.  That's all that need be said about Ballet Met's sweet "Beauty and the Beast," which just opened Thursday night at the Ohio Theater, and which will play through Sunday, March 14.  

The music is lovely, the dancing divine, the costumes breathtaking, the sets entrancing. David Nixon's choreography and concept both work admirably well.   The lead performances by Carrie West and Richard Tullius were also fine, as were the efforts of the rest of the cast and the orchestra.  It's a piece that rises or falls on its grace and emotional pull, and in its opening night, the whole thing worked.

Politics leaves its boot-print on almost every aspect of our lives. From our schools to health care, jobs and the environment, it seems we can never win when up against the powers that be. Casting our votes for the evil of two lessers, as dutifully citizens do every election cycle, surely leaves us with a lesser by the end of the day. So you would think "hope" should be brushed to the waste side as naïve optimism, clamored to by only the most stubborn of idealists.

"The trappings of a state of siege trap us in a state of fear ..."

Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis open up their new collection of essays with the extraordinary speech - "A Prayer for America" - that Dennis Kucinich delivered two years ago, when the wound of 9/11 was fresh and the Bush Administration had just begun to serve notice how it intended to exploit it.

Newcomers to the city often wonder how exactly did the Columbus Public Schools get so profoundly screwed up? If the Chamber of Commerce wanted to really give people moving into Columbus the truth of why the school system is so bad, they would include copies of A Schoolhouse Divided (Columbus Alive Publishing/Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism, $15.00) in their informational packets.

Why are the Columbus Public Schools a sinkhole of waste, fraud, sweetheart deals, corruption, and greed? The same reason bank robbers rob banks. Sitting on an annual budget of over $600 million, the school system is a piggy bank attracting opportunists whose motivation is to line their pockets instead of educating children.

In this compilation of essays from Columbus Alive, Urban Edition and The Free Press, Fitrakis turns his investigative journalist skills on the school system. From 1993 to 2003, Fitrakis takes the reader on a decade long bad trip through the morass that is education in Ohio.