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Plate of pierogis, mac and cheeze

Café Bourbon Street’s Pierogi Mountain, located in the North Campus area on Summit, has a seasonal variety of delicious, Eastern European Style, filled dumpling called Pierogi topped with caramelized onions. When you are buzzing around town looking for a vegan midnight meal, some music and great service, this dive-bar might just be the hive you were looking for.

CXC logo

Last fall, a group of local comic artists and art curators from Central Ohio introduced Columbus to Cartoon Crossroads Columbus (abbreviated as CXC), a new kind of comics convention that mixed fandom with academia and treated the medium as more than just a breeding ground for the next big-budget superhero movie. The event was enough of a success that it’s now been planned through 2019, running this year from Wednesday, October 12 through Sunday the 16th.

Once again the event will be held throughout the city, with the majority of events at the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum on OSU’s campus and the Columbus Metropolitan Library and Columbus College of Art & Design in Downtown Columbus.

Woman in bathing suit doing a flip in a dive

Around this time last year, Abby Johnston’s life revolved around boards. The 2008 Upper Arlington High School graduate was either studying for them (Johnston is in her third year of medical school at Duke University) or she was diving off of them.

After earning a silver medal in 3-meter synchronized diving with Kelci Bryant in the 2012 Olympic Games in London, Johnston placed 12th in the 3-meter springboard diving competition at the Olympic Games in Rio De Janeiro in August.

“The hardest part was balancing two separate worlds,” Johnston said. “It was hard to be fully engaged in medical school when I was away so much of the time (for diving). I was doing enough to get through my classes without getting involved in the other interest groups and whatnot.”

A typical day for Johnston involved getting up at 5 a.m., practicing from 6:15-8 a.m., and then scurrying off to classes until noon. In the afternoon, she’d go through another 90-minute practice; head back to classes and then find a place to study.

Photo of Winston

Winston Hightower is releasing “Exploration Date” on Super Dreamer records towards the end of October. “Exploration Date” is a follow-up to “Too Close to Home.”  Winston plays drums in Minority Threat. He was in Hardcore bands Yuze Boys and Puberty Wounds. Winston recently received some press that put him on experimental music innovators R. Stevie Moore and Gary Wilson’s radar.

“Exploration Date” sounds as if R. Stevie Moore filtered through the experimental narrative of Columbus Rock. Winton's solo stuff isn’t hardcore. Imagine Ariel Pink with ghostly Krylon Terracotta fingernail overspray from the Calumet Bridge.

Winston said of his contact with the influential Nashville musician, “I think R. Stevie Moore is at the point where he is so annoyed with me. That’s like my goal. That’s how I feel he operates.”

While we were conducting the interview it was difficult not to discuss our climate as this swing state that is reeling from the shooting of Ty’re King.

Man and woman on the floor taking a selfie

Going to Shadowbox Live can be a humbling experience. The troupe’s so-called “metaperformers” are so busy, ambitious and talented that you can’t help feeling like a lesser species in their presence.

For a prime example of what they’re capable of, see Broken Whispers, an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby that transforms the title character into a lesbian and tells her story through a combination of narration, dance and song. Radically changing a literary classic sounds like a dangerous endeavor, but the production is put together with such skill and ingenuity that it’s a wonder to behold.

And that’s just one of the shows currently being staged at Shadowbox. When you consider that the average troupe member juggles multiple productions with behind-the-scenes duties and even waiting tables, it’s hard not to conclude we’re dealing with a higher order of being here. 

Fortunately for our egos, every once in a while the Shadowboxers put on a show that proves they’re only human after all. Such an animal is Shadow Zone, the troupe’s annual Halloween-season production.


As most of the world ignores or hypocritically celebrates the 147th birthday of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on the International Day of Nonviolence on 2 October, some of us will quietly acknowledge his life by continuing to build the world that he envisioned. When asked for his message for the world, Gandhi responded with the now famous line 'My life is my message' reflecting his lifelong struggle against violence.

Gandhi's life was dotted with many memorable quotes but one that is less well known is this: 'You may never know what results come of your actions but if you do nothing there will be no results'.

Guys playing instruments

Do Italian musicians feel things differently?

Only one of these questions popped into my head at a very recent Friday Woodlands Tavern happy hour when the monstrously good guitarist Rick Collura and his Blue Cats played like the muddy waters of the Mississip coursed through their veins. I mean, baby, they were up to their necks in blue electric mud, churnin' out deep-pocketed groove like tax exiles in France. Groanin' and moanin' they had me, I confess. Where did their music end and my metabolism begin? It was a delta-Chicago-Vulcan soul-mind meld of the highest order. A rarity these days, what with all the roots doctors of music leaving no inheritors of the genre behind for what reason. Fuckin' millenials.

Nevertheless, I felt like I was in the catfish's stomach by the third song.

Poster about walk against toy guns

This past September many America citizens were hit back-to-back with the realization that Black boys and men are “moving targets” for some police officers in America. In Columbus a thirteen-year old was shot and killed. Why? According to the Columbus Police Department (CPD) he pulled a gun on them during a chase. The “gun” turned out to be a toy gun. King is the third young Black man killed by the CPD this past year in Columbus. The police-officer appears to have fallen under the misbelief that the teenage boy, who happens to be Black, wanted to harm him, and thus his lawyers defense that the white man who is a trained police officer was “in fear for his life.” And now Tyre King’s mother buries her son and cries “no peace until justice.”

A sign that says Reclaim OSU

On Tuesday, September 13th, the Lantern published an interview with President Michael Drake that misrepresented the details and events of and surrounding the #ReclaimOSU occupation last spring. We, as a coalition, have several corrections and rebuttals to President Drake’s comments:

Referring to the threats of expulsion against protestors at the ReclaimOSU protest, President Drake claimed that “it never would happen.” However, Dr. Drake has a history of upholding these same draconian measures against student activists. As Chancellor of The University of California Irvine, Drake threatened students who became known as the Irvine 11 with arrest and expulsion. After peacefully disrupting a speech by an Israeli ambassador, students were suspended from school and given three years of probation.

Black Lives Matter rally

On the tragic evening of September 14, 2016, Tyre King, aged 13, was shot and killed by Columbus Police Department (CPD) officer Bryan Mason. Around the city, people are mourning the death of this child. The scars are still new, and will never fade.

We mourn for Tyre and his family, and hope they can find some solace in the vigils and protests that have started to emerge around this atrocity.

While Tyre's story is unique and individual, the violence against him is also part of a larger pattern. So far this year, at the time of this writing, the police have killed 788 people (and counting), and a disproportionate number of them--almost 25 percent--were African American.

In terms of police killings that have received a great deal of media attention, Ohio stands out, with the deaths of Tyre King; Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old killed by police in November 2014, while he was holding a BB gun in a Cleveland public park; and John Crawford III, a 22 year old who police shot in August 2014, while he was in the aisle of a Walmart store near Dayton holding an air gun he was considering buying.

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