The latest round of state budget cuts literally is a matter of life and death to some of the people affected. More than 5,000 people use the Ohio HIV Drug Assistance Program (ODAP) to get expensive life-saving medications that treat HIV. Recent government belt-tightening, however, has led to a first-time waiting list and other major cost containment measures for the 20-year-old program.

Food and art have interesting commonalities in the way they are carefully prepared, the way they affect our senses and, perhaps most of all, the attention we pay to them when we find them strikingly beautiful. Because of the actions associated with cooking and eating, food lends itself to performance. This is just what the local performance art group Pones Inc. has done with its most recent work, Rub, Dredge, Fry (Repeat).

It's time for Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters to use his considerable influence and put the squeeze on Bengals owner Mike Brown. Hamilton County officials are desperately seeking to renegotiate the lease for Paul Brown Stadium because the county's stadium account is facing a $13.8 million deficit this year. The deficit will jump to $25 million in a few years and could cumulatively total more than $700 million by 2032, when the Bengals' lease expires. Unless the Bengals agree to some concessions, county commissioners will have to cut some services to residents, lay off some county workers or probably both to cover the shortfall.

If there were ever a perfect vantage point to watch the kind of moments that make city life so fascinating, it's at ForkHeartKnife, the tiny kitchen at Main and Liberty that's owned and operated by some of the friendliest and most creative women in Over-the-Rhine. After two visits to ForkHeartKnife, I'm a big fan. It's just such a personal experience, like dining with friends.

I move on trying to play catch-up with a mountain of new album releases, with just barely a breath to mention the passings of underground comic author Harvey Pekar and counterculture figure Tuli Kupferberg, co-frontman and songwriter for The Fugs. Let's check out the new albums from Ed Kowalczyk (of Live fame), Magnolia Mountain, Jimmie Vaughan, Walter Trout, Kylie Minogue and The Cat Empire.

For a film about family, Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right effectively twists the dynamics in ways both obvious and subtle. As a long-together lesbian couple, Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) have achieved a degree of domestic perfection that defies convention by being utterly conventional in its own way. Grade A.