Local

Official vote counts in Ohio indicate a major defeat for the nation’s first corporate-sponsored marijuana legalization referendum.

Is there such a thing as too much sex?

In the very first scene of Love, director/screenwriter Gaspar Noe lets us know he’s leaving nothing to the imagination. Lovers Murphy (Karl Glusman) and Electra (Aomi Muyock) are shown in bed manually pleasuring each other.

The scene is filmed both beautifully and graphically. Everything—and I do mean everything—is out in the open.

For the next two hours and 14 minutes, Noe keeps everything out in the open with one sex scene after another, some of them even more explicit than the first. As if to remind us that we’re seeing all of this in 3-D, he even includes a close-up of a penis just as it ejaculates right into our expectant faces.

Would you believe me if I said the main product of all these adult-rated escapades is utter boredom?

The first problem is that we don’t care a fig about the characters whose most private moments are playing out in front of us. How could we, when we see almost nothing but their most private moments?

If your name is Donald Trump, or Dick Cheney, or George W Bush, then don’t bother reading this.  This article is to help the rest of us to better understand how Donald Trump et al think.  The psychiatric literature has long known that people with narcissistic personality disorder, also called the narcissistic sociopath, are far more common at the upper end of politics and business in the United States.  About 1% of people in general show the criteria of the condition, yet 20% of CEOs in “Fortune 500” companies and many politicians in this country have these characteristics. 

So it pays to know how these people think since it allows us to accurately predict their behavior.  The cause of narcissistic personality condition can be summarized in three words: low self-esteem.  The person’s thinking process is overwhelmed with the need to show them as powerful and important.  It is much more common in men than women, and, thus, testosterone, one of the key driving forces of emotional behavior, powers this condition. 

Are you kicking yourself for missing this year’s Telluride Film Festival? Not to mention Sundance, Tribeca and Cannes?

  Have no fear. You can still catch a film festival—in fact, two of them. And you don’t even have to leave town to do it.

  Every November, a pair of festivals vie for local film lovers’ attention. True, you aren’t likely to see Hollywood celebs at either of them, but if you happen to like non-mainstream films—especially those with a Jewish, LGBT and/or Ohio connection—you’re in luck.

  First up is the Columbus Jewish Film Festival, running Nov. 1-15 at various venues. Just how Jewish is it?

  “We don’t really have strict criteria,” said festival director Emily Schuss, explaining that a film might be chosen simply because it has a Jewish director or touches on Jewish themes.

People say to me, write some damn previews. Spread the word. These are music events that Columbus will be hosting in the next month.

The Game

Xclusive Elite

October 31st

$30-50

  The Game just dropped the Documentary 2 and The Documentary 2.5 for the 10 Year history of his classic album the documentary. The Game is known to be hyper-referential in his lyrics.

  Well,the Documentary 2 both shows that  1) Game has personal history that can be -self-referenced and 2) also takes routes into 91-96 East Coast Hip Hop in addition to Game’s usual Dr. Dre’s cultural impact in the flesh existence.
   “The Documentary 2” allows a slew of guests like Diddy, Kanye, Will-Iam, Dre, Kendrick Lamar and others to present a history of “Hip Hop” through a Compton lens, then and now.

In the increasingly rare moments that I spend on Facebook, I have been seeing a bunch of articles about what bartenders think of you based on your drink order. These are all purportedly written by real bartenders, most of whom seem to have a healthy talent for plagiarism (which I support). Some of these are actually pretty good – the “Patron Margarita: I wish to spend $12 on a drink that will taste exactly the same as its $8 counterpart” appears in most of them.
  But it does get me thinking about the rampant on-stage boozing engaged in by many local bands, an activity in which I have at times enthusiastically engaged. Whether subsidized – in whole or in part – by live music venues or paid for in precious band cash, it’s a fact of life. A local act playing a local bar has an absolute right to shamelessly indulge in the drink of their choice, and if you don’t like it the Palace Theatre is right down the street.

Brassica, a new comer in the Short North, hands down, gets my vote for “best falafel sandwich” in Columbus. If the custom opportunity of building the sandwich myself wasn’t enough reason to love it, the care they put into making every component downright delicious sealed the deal. Sumac and paprika seasoned fries was a fresh twist (though I rarely eat fries). Truth-be-told they had me at fresh baked pita, house made baba ganoush, “crispy” onions and that roasted red pepper sauce. They ensure you can get a robust infusion of healthy nutrients with fresh pressed juice that is fairly affordable.  Brassica continues to strive with their organic, local and sustainable packaging standards typical of their sister establishments, Northstar Café and Third and Hollywood.

The Drug War has been a forty-year lynching….
…the corporate/GOP response to the peace and civil rights movements.  

It’s used the Drug Enforcement Administration and other policing operations as a high-tech Ku Klux Klan, meant to gut America’s communities of youth and color.  

It has never been about suppressing drugs. Quite the opposite.

And now that it may be winding down, the focus on suppressing minority votes will shift even stronger to electronic election theft.

The Drug War was officially born June 17, 1971, (http://www.drugpolicy.org/new-solutions-drug-policy/brief-history-drug-war) when Richard Nixon pronounced drugs to be “Public Enemy Number One.” In a nation wracked by poverty, racial tension, injustice, civil strife, ecological disaster, corporate domination, a hated Vietnam War and much more, drugs seemed an odd choice.
In fact, the Drug War’s primary target was black and young voters.