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Dear President Obama:

We're delighted that you have begun the long-awaited process of normalizing relations with Cuba, and we're anxious to see a US embassy open in Havana, but there is an action that you alone can take to further improve relations: take Cuba off the terrorist list!

Most people around the world would find it very strange that Cuba would be on a “terrorist list" with Sudan, Syria and Iran. Cuba is most known worldwide for exporting doctors, musicians, teachers, artists, and dancers–– not terrorists.

Cuban diplomats says they cannot conceive of re-establishing diplomatic relations with the United States while Cuba continues to be considered a sponsor of international terrorism. President Obama, your next executive action should include removing Cuba from the list!

Signed, Your Name   Click here to sign the petition

As the world’s nuke reactors begin to crumble and fall, the danger of a major disaster is escalating at the decrepit Davis-Besse plant near Toledo, Ohio.

Now the plant’s owners are asking the Ohio Public Utilities Commission to force the public to pay billions of dollars over the next 15 years to subsidize reactor operations.

The Davis–Besse Nuclear Power Station near Toledo, Ohio.

But Davis-Besse’s astonishing history of near-miss disasters defies belief. Its shoddy construction, continual operator error and relentless owner incompetence would not be believed as fiction, let alone as the stark realities of a large commercial reactor operating in a heavily populated area.

Glenn Brewer graduated with Honors and a BFA in Fine Arts from the Columbus College of Art and Design. He has created illustrations for numerous companies and publications including TSR, Inc., Visionary Entertainment Studios, The New Orleans Tribune, Frost Illustrated, Tygeron Graphics and Unchained Spirit Enterprises, a children’s book publisher. Brewer is best known for the six-part comic series Askari Hodari, which he wrote, illustrated and published. Askari Hodari was nominated twice and eventually won the Howard E. Day Prize. Brewer also was nominated for a Glyph Award in the Best Self-Publisher category for his Askari Hodari series.

1.      Describe for our readers the most compelling art piece you have made?

The cover for the first issue of my Askari Hodari comic.  It's an image of a man with his arms crossed on his chest holding two guns.  Readers had different reactions to it.  Some were disgusted while others got it. However the felt initially, the cover intrigued them enough to take a chance and give the book a read.

2.     Tell us about your best, most successful, or most fulfilling art show?

When Jen Paine first moved to Columbus in 2006, the Canadian native made an immediate web search for a curling club. She found exactly what she was looking in the Columbus Curling Club, located at 2999 Silver Drive in Columbus.

Sexual practices involving bondage, dominance, sadism and masochism are sometimes lumped together under the acronym BDSM. Whatever you call them, they’re all the rage at the multiplex.

  It was just a week ago that Fifty Shades of Grey started steaming up movie screens nationwide. And now the Gateway Film Center is offering a curtain call in the form of The Duke of Burgundy.

  The eccentric British film is about a lesbian couple whose sex life follows a rigid pattern of domination and punishment.

  The pattern begins when Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna) arrives to clean house for Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen), a scholar who specializes in the study of butterflies and moths. Evelyn appears to take her chores seriously, but the poor girl invariably leaves something undone, and Cynthia finds it necessary to punish her.

  Though the pattern is cut-and-dried up until this point, what happens next isn’t—dried, I mean. Listening from the other side of the bedroom door, we realize that Cynthia is showering Evelyn with something, and it definitely isn’t praise.

Artist X
Artist X graduated from Thomas Worthington High School in 1991. He then went on to earn a BFA and MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and The Ohio State University respectively. For the past twelve years he's spent most of his time as a guerrilla city planner and Commons social entrepreneur trying to advance a disruptive innovation that would situate Columbus at the center of a new Arts and Crafts “Renaissance Revival” movement. He's currently shopping around for a lawyer to force the issue and otherwise take the Establishment to task.


1. Describe for our readers the most compelling art piece you have made: Generally

speaking, the most compelling art piece to me is whatever I am working on at any given

point in time. Right now I have about five projects ongoing. The first, started this past

summer, is a fence mural in the King-Lincoln District that deals with the origins of the

so-called “white race.” While that’s on the back burner, due to the weather, I’m working

On February 26th, the Federal Communications Commission (better known as the FCC) will be voting on whether to classify broadband internet as a Title II service - something that would give it the same open legal status as telephone lines, a concept called net neutrality. For those of us who regularly read, stream and, yes, even torrent from online sources, this is more than just a vague formality. Losing net neutrality could have a massive and possibly permanent impact on how we get not just entertainment but news and other information. And while some in Washington are speaking out on the side of an open internet, Republicans are already tossing out meaningless reactionary phrases like “Obamacare for the internet” to try to secure the tubes for their corporate sponsors.

  The concept of net neutrality is a simple one: Your internet service provider is not allowed to filter, throttle or otherwise meddle with what you’re accessing. They can’t block sites or slow down streaming from certain sources.

I linked up with DJ Musa and DJ Hamadi aka DJ Empty Nest to discuss the philosophy, culture and music direction of their Blvck Ice dance party which took place on Friday, Febuary 13 at Ace of Cups.

  The origin of my intrigue stemmed from a New Years Eve party I attended that Musa and Hamadi deejayed.

  People were having fun but eventually the party got shut down by the police who maced  celebrators and arrested some residents.

  At some point I watched someone burn an American flag while black humans explained their opposition with the abrupt ending of the evening to the police.

  Hamadi recounted his vantage point from behind the turntables, “We dropped acid that night. We were on acid playing the largest house party I had every seen. I remember being on acid feeling the floor shake.”

  Musa explained that the house party ended when police came knocking, “One of the residents got pulled out of their house and they pepper-sprayed everyone that tried to help her back into the house.”

An old bag lady waits for the COTA bus downtown. She gets on at 11 a.m. She rides it as far as it goes and gets a transfer to another bus and repeats the action. She rides 10 buses through the course of the day. Eventually she ends up in the same spot where she started. She is older when she finishes than when she started out. End of story.

  This, my friend, is what the new Bob Dylan album, Shadows In The Night, is like. Nothing more. Maybe a little bit less. Except it's not circular, it's flat like Kansas.

  But here's the riddle, if not the punchline, and it is so goddam Zen it makes you love Bob even more than you already do: He's doing entirely Frank Sinatra songs!

  It's a joke, right?

  No joke, chump. The joke would be if he did Wu-Tang's 36 Chambers album in its entirety. That would be funny. Nope, the Chairman of the Croak does the Chairman of the Board. Fuggettaboutit.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Bobby Keen, Lyle Lovett’s college friend at Texas A&M and author of that most inadvertent of sad songs, “Feelin’ Good Again.” Notwithstanding the success of 1989’s “The Road Goes On Forever,” Keen never got big enough to forget how to write songs, and although his recent albums have been spotty they have still contained gems like 2009’s “Goodbye Cleveland.”

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