Local

ComFest needs people with professional license and/or other comparable standing in health care & medicine are automatically welcome. For those not, you only need to have certified training (Red Cross and American Heart Assn courses qualify) in First Aid & CPR, or otherwise demonstrate appropriate skills.

We operate two First Aid Stations: the Main Station, in the center of Goodale Park, is just a bit northwest of Safety Radio Base, and adjacent to Cleanup & Recycling, Signage, and the golf cart corral. It operates 9am-midnight on Friday, somewhat earlier on Saturday and Sunday. Station 2 is on the east edge of Goodale Park, across the street from the intersection of Park Street and West Poplar, and operates 3-11pm Friday, and 3-9pm Saturday and Sunday. Both First Aid Stations are in synch with a three-member unit of firefighter/paramedics from the Special Events Office of the Columbus Division of Fire. Firefighters and colleagues are members of Local 67, IAF.

After seeing her dance to Sia’s “Chandelier” at the Grammys, I’ve come to the conclusion that Kristen Wiig can do just about anything.

She excels in sketch comedy (Saturday Night Live). She can carry a big-screen comedy (Bridesmaids). She can handle cinematic drama (The Skeleton Twins).

Now, with Welcome to Me, Wiig shows she can play a mentally unstable character without turning her into a stereotypical freak. Even more impressively, she does it in a dramatically unstable movie that would collapse into a messy heap without her presence.

Wiig plays Alice Klieg, a woman with what she describes as a “borderline personality disorder,” or what once might have been called manic depression. When she’s not having state-mandated sessions with her psychiatrist (Tim Robbins), she seems to spend her days watching and memorizing taped episodes of Oprah.

Then two things happen that upset her reclusive existence: She goes off her meds, and she wins the lottery. And, I mean, she really wins the lottery, to the tune of $86 million.

When you book some dates at a recording studio, it’s fairly common practice for the engineer to ask you what bands you sound like. It isn’t intended as an insult to your originality, it’s just them making sure the right microphones or whatnot are available. An engineer friend of mine periodically exhibits frustration with bands that insist that they absolutely don’t sound like anybody else. It is these bands, he says, that 99 times out of 100 sound exactly like someone else.
  And that’s a pretty good rule of thumb, in music and perhaps in life generally. I would expect that it’s actually a fairly widespread belief, even among degenerate Free Press readers. But humor me for a second, folks, while I review a record from a band that honest-to-God doesn’t sound like anybody else.
  A year and a half ago I did a concert review of a band called the Devil Doves, who I stumbled into following a Blue Jackets game. They’ve finally gotten around to putting out an eponymous debut album, which is, like, fantastic. And also very hard to adequately explain.

Hundreds of Columbus citizens marched in solidarity with the demonstrators in Baltimore asking for justice for Freddie Gray, who was killed while in police custody. The protestors started at the OSU Student Union and marcheddown High Street through the Short North on Saturday, May 2 during Gallery Hop. They gathered on the cap north of downtown to talk about their request to meet with Columbus Police Chief Kim Jacobs and discuss an initiative for a Civilian Review Board of the Columbus Police.

The Central Ohio Worker's Center planned and numerous other local organizations supported a march and rally to raise the minimum wage in Columbus on May Day, May 1st. See the photo slide show below. (Photos by Bob Studzinski)

A Black man in Columbus fatally shot the mother of his children and her brother. Recently another Black man fatally shot his 28 year old ex-girlfriend in front of their children in Chicago, Illinois. What is the reason for this behavior? Is it that we as a Black people don’t love each other? Why are Black men killing the mother of their children? Is the love gone?
  Author, Radio and Television Personality, Khari Enaharo, deals with this issue and more in his upcoming book “Sex Code War.” I had the pleasure of hearing Khari give a speech recently called “Black While Loving.” He also honored me with an interviewed later. Khari gave several examples of how we can determine if “the love is gone.”  “…The love is gone when mass respect is replaced with mass disrespect, when physical abuse takes the place of a tender touch the love has gone, when a male refuses to work and take care of his children, his woman and his household, the love is gone.”

The Salt of the Earth may be the most gut-wrenching journey you’ll take this year. Also, the most moving.
  The documentary is about Sebastiao Salgado, a Brazilian-born photographer who has devoted most of his career to recording the struggles and sorrows of humanity. The quest has made him the witness to famines, wars and genocides, along with their painful aftermaths.
  Like Joseph Conrad, he and his camera have peered into “the heart of darkness,” a task that inevitably has shaken his faith in mankind. “We are a ferocious animal,” he says, speaking in subtitled French.
  Narrating his own photos of some of recent history’s worst examples of man’s inhumanity to man, Salgado adds that everyone should view these images “to see how horrible our species is.”
  At times like these, one might well wonder whether The Salt of the Earth is titled ironically. Thankfully, life eventually finds a way to uplift Salgado’s spirit—along with ours, making the documentary the cinematic equivalent of a fire-and-brimstone sermon that ends with the joyous promise of redemption.

If you ever threw a plastic bottle in the wrong receptacle at Comfest, you may have encountered our zero waste hero, Bill Finzel. The most memorable vision a festival-goer may remember from Comfests past would be Finzel’s head popping up out of a dumpster as he retrieved some wayward recyclable materials.    

  “Bill has been an active proponent of recycling since the early 70s. He made recycling at events mainstream,” Greg Maynard said of his friend and fellow Comfest volunteer. It is true enough, as Comfest was certainly one of the first, if not the actual FIRST, festival in the city to have recycling containers on the grounds.

SEX 101

A few conversations have brought it back that sometimes we need a refresher course, back to basics. While it's Springtime and the birds and the bees are doing their thing, let's talk about some fundamentals of what it means to get it on, and how it can be a great experience for all parties involved. Consent is your first priority. If you don't have a partner's consent for sexual activity, it's no longer a sexual act, it's an act of violence.  

Anatomy

Learn what all the parts are and how they operate. The clitoris contains at least 8,000 sensory nerve endings – twice as many in the entire penis. These nerve endings run down “the legs” of the clitoris and continue in a Figure 8 around the anus – like an uneven infinity symbol. When clitoral and vulva tissue is stimulated, sometimes it expands. The tissue will be full of blood and grows, some to a much larger proportion and the color of the tissue changes too. If this occurs with you (or your partner), you are normal.

Protection

JEFF GERMAN AT NATALIES. On Saturday, April 15, I went to Natalie’s Pizza for Jeff German’s half-CD release party. Jeff is due to release his second record on Slothtrop Records later this year, and his label was releasing an early five-song “maxi-single.”
  I had a chance to listen to the single itself, a song called “Woodshed,” and a few of its supporting pieces on the drive up. Woodshed conjures a time warp between present and past, a place that has still has eight tracks, black and white TVs, and affordable vintage guitars. It might be 2015, it might be 1972, which fits right in with German’s history of writing to a mythic past, where long roads still lead to nowhere and strangers still ride into town and take an inconspicuous seat at the back of the bar.