Andyman: A legend lives on in the hearts of Peppercorn and company

White man with brown hair playing a guitar and singing at a mic with other musicians

This is a little weird so bear with me, folks.

I'm gonna write you about the best night o' music I've had so far this year--the Andyman tribute a month ago at the Little Rock Bar on N. Fourth Street by the Joe Peppercorn congregation. Joe and bros performed their original music as The Whiles and then a solid couple of hours of stuff by a quaint if daftly named British boy band from yesteryear and Liverpool called The Beatles.

But first, my short essay on the first 16 seconds of the first song on the third Black Sabbath album and what that precious quarter of a minute has spawned, like a cross between a supremely fertile devil rabbit and a bat-eating alcoholic slob with a fantastic lashed-to-the-mast voice.

The song: Sweet Leaf.

The album: Master of Reality.

The guitarist: three-fingered Tony Iommi.

The chord pattern: bow-bow/babba-bow/bowww/bow-bow!

Repeat. Again.

Bang head on study hall table. Do it in detention six hours later. Never stop. Never give in. Sabbath rules.

Boycott Wendy’s demonstration

Drawing of girl's head with red pigtails with blue bows and freckles with a circle and line through it in black on top of her indicating No, and the words Wendy's Boycott

As we go to press, dozens of farmworker women and men from Florida and scores of clergy, students and consumer allies from around Columbus and the country plan to converge at Wendy’s Dublin, Ohio headquarters on Tuesday morning, June 5 at 9am, 1 Dave Thomas Blvd. off of 161, to protest Wendy’s deafening silence in the face of a growing national boycott of the fast-food retailer.

As a colorful public protest draws attention outside headquarters’ Thomas Conference Center, a farmworker delegation plans to enter the meeting to directly address Wendy’s Board and leadership on the company’s failure to join McDonald’s, Burger King, and 12 other retailer peers in the Fair Food Program. The workers and consumers will decry Wendy’s choice to abandon Florida farms participating in the Fair Food Program in order to source tomatoes from Mexico, where egregious rights violations like sexual assault, child labor, and modern-day slavery are commonplace and well-documented.

OSU’s med marijuana hypocrisy

Red cross with a green marijuana leaf in front and the words Marijuana is Medicine

Even though The Ohio State University has researched cannabis to discover new therapeutic benefits, the university is refusing to test cannabis for The Ohio Medical Marijuana Control Program.

State law says medical marijuana, like other agricultural products, has to be tested for quality and levels of pesticide, for example, before being sold to the public. And when Ohio legalized medical marijuana in 2016, state lawmakers mandated they would only allow public universities during the program’s first year to test the medicine.

OSU is not alone when it comes to researching cannabis but at the same time refusing to set up a testing lab. The University of Cincinnati and Ohio University are researching cannabis for medicinal uses, to help epileptic children, for example, but have also turned a cold shoulder to the state program.

What’s more, could this double standard by state universities delay the program?

Bob Bridges, the patient advocate on the state’s medical marijuana advisory board, recently told the Columbus Dispatch he doesn’t have confidence the program will be up-and-running for its designated “fully functional” date of September 8th.

Robert Kennedy Jr. finally acknowledges the Conspiracy Realists regarding his fathers death.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Robert Kennedy Jr. revealed that he has come to the conclusion that Sirhan Sirhan did not kill his father, Robert Kennedy (RFK) at the Ambassador Hotel in June of 1968. RFK's assassination came on the heels of his brother John Kennedy's assassination in Dallas in 1963, and Martin Luther King's killing in Memphis in April of 1968. Serious researchers did not believe the official pronouncement regarding these three assassinations from the outset. While painstakingly revealing the discrepancies in the evidence over 50 years, mainstream media in America have served as Pravda for the CIA, clinging to the lone gunman theory in all three assassinations.

 

Memorial Day and Everywhere is War

Summer approaches and the stench of war is all around. Or, as the great Bob Marley put it, Everywhere is War. Start with the commemorations over a five-week span of Memorial Day, Flag Day and Independence Day, all presented varyingly as celebrations of our war dead, symbols of our greatness, the freedoms we love so dearly and seek to export to every corner of the world and, perhaps most important, the unquestioned rightness of our cause.

CORIOLANUS Theater Review Shakespeare’s Class Struggle Epic:

Calendar shmalendar - the way this critic knows summer has arrived is by attending the premiere of Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum’s repertory season at its airy Topanga Canyon amphitheater. A joyous annual ritual for me is making the trek out to this woodsy nook north of Malibu where WGTB extends the conventional notion of the stage.

 

Audiences are familiar with theatrical terms such as “the fourth wall” and “theater in the round.” But ensconced on a hillside amidst a forest, WGTB gives us what could be called “three dimensional theater.” This year’s exceptional opening production, William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, is an excellent case in point. The tragedy’s mise-en-scène is barely constrained to the stage per se, as the ample-sized (and talented) company makes full use of the slopes behind the boards and the surrounding sylvan glade. They troupers troop up and down the aisles, gather and cavort behind the bleacher seats and so on, making full use of the Topanga landscape. Corio’s choreo gives new meaning to Shakespeare’s dictum in As You Like It that “all the world’s a stage.”

 

THE BALLAD OF BIMINI BATHS: MEXICAN DAY Theater Review

The personal is extremely personal in Rogue Machine’s Mexican Day. Tom Jacobson’s insightful script intimately, intricately interweaves ethnicity, class, sexuality and more in his story depicting a landmark Civil Rights struggle in late 1940s Los Angeles, when a sort of “apartheid light” was still being practiced in a not so angelic City of the Angels. This segregation is the source of the title of Jacobson’s play, which is part of a trilogy.

 

At least three of the drama’s thespian quartet depicts actual historical personages in Jacobson’s two-acter. First and foremost is the renowned African American equal rights activist Bayard Rustin (Donathan Walters, who recently understudied Bigger Thomas and The Black Rat at Antaeus Theatre’s gut-wrenching production of Richard Wright’s Native Son). In the late 1940s, Rustin - who eventually became a key organizer of 1963’s legendary “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” wherein Dr. King made his “I have a dream speech” - is dispatched to L.A. to desegregate Bimini Baths, an actual hot springs oasis with mineral waters that had existed in what is now L.A.’s Koreatown.

 

Trumperial Presidency



Pro-Choice AF Tie Dye Party!

Sleeveless T-shirt with colorful tie-dye pattern in a spiral and the words Pro choice AF

Sun, June 5, 12pm
61 Jefferson Ave.
This is our June Crafternoon event!

Help us get ready for PRIDE season!! We've got white tank tops AND t-shirts that say PRO CHOICE AF for you to tie-dye! The cost is $15 and it includes either a t-shirt or a tank top and whatever colors (and materials) your heart desires for your tie-dye!

It'll also be a potluck! Bring something summery and we'll try to cook out! 

Make sure to wear clothes you're okay with getting dye on - accidents happen after all. :) 

We *should* have enough dye for some individual projects if you want to bring your own stuff, but we hope you like us enough to wear a NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio shirt that you've dyed yourself! 

These will also double as our summer tabling shirt, so we hope you love us enough to volunteer with us this summer, too!!

Pages

Subscribe to Freepress.org RSS