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Reader Question:

    What is Ecosexuality?

Thank you reader for your question. I would like to introduce you to my friends, Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, the founders of the Ecosexual movement.

“We're changing the metaphor from 'Earth as Mother' to 'Earth as Lover'”

• Elizabeth Stephens, Artist, Ecosexual, Professor

“We aim to make the environmental movement more sexy, fun and diverse.”

• Annie Sprinkle, PhD, Artist, Ecosexual, Sexologist

On May 17, 2008 I attended Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens' Green Wedding To The Earth, performed outdoors on the University of Santa Cruz campus.

Ray Davies of the Kinks might've paraphrased himself after seeing the Queens of the Stone Age last Sunday night and asked: Where have all the good riffs gone?

     Or as George Thorogood once answered my question as to why he didn't write his own blues and rock'n'roll songs, "All the good ones have already been written."

     So as much as they are considered a riff-heavy band and leader Josh Homme a songwriter in his own league, I'm somewhat verklempt and confused about the alleged greatness of the Queens. Yes, they pack a five-fingered death punch rhythmically--sometimes. Yes, they have a fabulously enthusiastic bassist in Michael Shuman who, when his Fender bass playing locks in with drummer Jon Theodore's bass drum pedal (and together they were locked in tighter than a stripper's belly button piercings all night), it's a bit Jones/Bonham. And with a few of the guitar riffs the effect WILL grab you by your privates and make you shake, rattle and roll--a little bit.

It took two trips for me to find Slate Run Vineyard. Based on my chat with owner Keith Pritchard, that is a common occurrence. It seems his land is located where three counties and several different mail system merge together. GPS systems are frequently stymied when trying to find Slate Run. So to help you, here is the key to not driving up and down Winchester Southern Road for hours on end. Find Slate Run Metro Park and drive 1/2 mile north looking for the sign for Slate Run Vineyard.

The tent in front of the Ohio Statehouse is gone. The populist ferment of ordinary people out to fight the rich and powerful in the streets has vanished. It appears that the 1% remain incredibly wealthy and unaccountable. Amid the current political calm resides the collective memory surrounding the Occupy movement, one of the great uprisings against the robber barons in American history.  

On this two-year anniversary of Occupy’s birth, and a year after Occupy Columbus ended their Ohio Statehouse encampment, the Free Press wondered what happened to the controversial Occupy Columbus movement. Was it assassinated by the power elite that control the city of Columbus and the politicians that do their bidding? Did it die of natural causes?

Occupy’s Origin

When the nationwide Occupy crackdown began in late 2011, this author found himself in California. Increasingly I was drawn to Occupy Oakland, where I had lived previously, and where a police raid on  the occupy encampment had nearly killed a protester, Marine Corps Iraq veteran Scott Olson, by shooting him in the face with a tear gas grenade at short range.

Let me first stipulate that I’m not an attorney, but I have an opinion. I didn’t know that you had to be one in order to have one. My opinion concerns the recent guidance issued by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) with regard to marijuana enforcement under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). Call mine an educated opinion. Let the Letters to the Editor debate me.

On August 29, 2013, James M. Cole, the Deputy Attorney General at the DOJ issued a memo to all United States Attorneys entitled, “Guidance Regarding Marijuana Enforcement.” This is the same James M. Cole who issued similar guidance in June 29, 2011, updating guidance that was issued by Deputy Attorney General David W. Ogden on October 19, 2009.

In those memos, the DOJ seems intent on clarifying its clarifications. The most recent memo claimed that the agency has focused its efforts on these enforcement priorities, among others:

-         Preventing the distribution of marijuana to minors;

Over the last few weeks you’ve seen the ads start to roll in.

In one, Mayor Michael Coleman talks about it being time for Columbus City Schools to match the rest of the city’s greatness. There is a commercial with a teacher and one with a parent. And just this past week mailers, replete with images of smiling children,  began to arrive at homes in the district.

The district's levy campaign – Coleman’s education commission-cum-levy commission known as Reimagine Columbus Education – has begun in earnest to “sell” issues 50 and 51 ahead of the Nov. 5 election.

The 9.01 mil levy will bring approximately $76 million into the system for each of the next four years. One-third is for district operations and five of the other six mils deal with teacher training and retention, technology and expanding pre-kindergarten. It represents a 23.5 percent tax increase, or $315 additional every year for every $100,000 of home value.

It’s September, which means it’s time for Nightmare on Front Street, the latest version of Shadowbox Live’s annual Halloween show.

What’s that you say? You’re not ready for Halloween yet? Well, don’t feel bad, as it seems to have crept up on Shadowbox, too. The show has funny moments here and there, along with some smokin’ rock tunes, but this is not one of the troupe’s better efforts overall.

For starters—or rather, finishers—Shadowbox ends the show by interrupting a typical Dr. Mystery episode with an attempt at political commentary. As longtime patrons know, Dr. Mystery is a silly combination of narration, puppets and live action that is usually good for a laugh, a chuckle or at least an eye roll. It’s probably possible to add politics to the mix if it’s done on the sly, but the current skit does it in a heavy-handed way that only succeeds in bringing the whole thing to an awkward halt.

Actually, most of the show’s second half is much better.

Watching a movie about sex, like engaging in the act itself, is more fun if you can avoid distractions. Unfortunately, it’s hard to watch a new movie about sexual addiction without being distracted by memories of two earlier films.

The newcomer is Thanks for Sharing, directed and co-written by Stuart Blumberg. The first earlier film was The Kids Are All Right (2010), an unconventional family drama that also was co-scripted by Blumberg. The other was Shame (2011), a dark work about a man whose sexual addiction controlled his life.

Though Thanks for Sharing isn’t bad, it pales in comparison to these earlier films. It lacks the naturalness and unpredictability of the first, and it lacks the sheer power of the second.

Think of it as Shame Lite.

Set in Manhattan, the comedy-drama centers on three men who attend 12-step meetings in an attempt to control their dictatorial desires.

I-71 really doesn't seem like a green line. Even with the new sound barriers, it's as pastoral a tank-moving thoroughfare as there could be in a major metropolitan city. I certainly don't ever remember going through any checkpoints as a kid, though I do remember never being able to play with my friends because they lived on the “other” side.

The particular nature of Columbus's segregation is something that I had always intuited but never consciously realized, until I saw the census map released by a research center from the University of Virginia a couple of weeks ago. The map shows a few things, such as how much more densely populated the “W” side of the Mississippi is as opposed to the “K” side, but its main goal is to graphically illustrate the nature of American segregation, blue dots for white people, red dots for Asians, orange dots for Hispanic, gray dots for “other” and green dots for black.

(see the map at: http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/index.html)